cognitive psyc chapter 4

Question 1

attention

Answer 1

focusing of mental effort on certain aspects or environments and blocking out other ones
-its selective, limited, and can be directed

Question 2

why is attention needed

Answer 2

-bc our senses provide more info then our brain can process
-our working memory can only hold a certain amount of info at once

Question 3

dichotic listening

Answer 3

-one message is presented to the left ear and another to the right ear
-participant “shadows” one message to ensure he/she is attending to that message

Question 4

results of dichotic listening

Answer 4

-the participants could accuartely shadow the mssage and filter out the messages
-but they couldn’t report details of message other than the pitch and gender,etc.

Question 5

broadbent’s filter model

Answer 5

-select info based on physical characteristics of stimuli
-unattended info is filtered out before it can be sent to brain areas responsible for analyzing the meaning of the message

Question 6

filter

Answer 6

-Identifies messages based on physical characteristics
-A “bottleneck” that limits information transfer
-Only attended message is passed on

Question 7

detector

Answer 7

-processes info to determine meaning
-info sent to memory and conciousness

Question 8

broadbents model can’t explain…

Answer 8

that participant’s can sometimes detect highly salient
information in the unattended message
-ex. your name

Question 9

treisman’s attenuation theory

Answer 9

-instead of filter there’s attenuator
-analyzes incoming info
-the analysis proceeds far enough to separate messages
-attended message is passed at full strength
-unattended message is passed on at full strength

Question 10

late selection models

Answer 10

selection of info for full processing doesn’t happen until after info has been fully analyzed for meaning

Question 11

Mckay

Answer 11

-its a dichotic listening experiment
-in one attended ear, participants heard ambigous sentences (ex. “they were throwing stones at the bank”
- in unattended ear participants heard words related to different meanings of the ambigous words (“river” or “money”)
-after this participants were given memory test and had to choose which option was closest to attended message
-ex. They threw stones toward the side of the river yesterday
-They threw stones at the savings and loan yesterday
-biased words affected perception

Question 12

cognitive resources

Answer 12

processing capacity that can be allocated to perform cognitive tasks

Question 13

task load

Answer 13

Amount of cognitive resources are used to accomplish a task

Question 14

high load tasks

Answer 14

uses almost all; no resources for other tasks

Question 15

low load tasks

Answer 15

uses few; resources available for other tasks

Question 16

overt attention

Answer 16

body movements to align our sense organs to better detect the stimulus

Question 17

covert attention

Answer 17

-Internal processes
e.g., changes in neural responses to the stimulus

Question 18

visual overt orienting

Answer 18

body, head & eye movements that position the image of the attended stimulus on the appropriate region of the retina
-pauses between eye movements are fixations

Question 19

edogenous processing

Answer 19

-Top-down process
-Our knowledge obtain from previous experience affects how we direct our attention
-Object salience can be affected by current goals

Question 20

spotlight of attention

Answer 20

a region of the visual field that is selected for enhanced processing

Question 21

precuing

Answer 21

info/ a cue that directs attention to a spatial location before the presentation of the target
-If the cue predicts the target location most of the time (e.g. 80%) it is called a predictive cue
-when the cue is predictive, participants respond faster to a target at the cued location (valid trial) than at an uncued location (invalid trial)

Question 22

physiology of attention

Answer 22

-converging evidence from many techniques (single cell recording, EEG, neuroimaging, neuropsychology) has shown that Attention
-involves processing that is distributed across a large
number of areas in the brain
-enhances neural responding to attended stimuli
-can suppress responses to unattended stimuli

Question 23

divided attention

Answer 23

-frequently there are multiple important source of
information that we want to attend to
-we can effectively divide our attention under some
circumstances but there are limitations

Question 24

consistent mapping condition

Answer 24

-Performance increased with practice
-Participants became able to efficiently divide their
attention across all the items in the test frames

Question 25

automaticity

Answer 25

Many tasks become automatic with practice
Reading is highly automatic in most people

Question 26

stroop effect

Answer 26

-naming the colour of ink, performance is slowed if
the ink is used to write the name of another colour
-Automatically reading the word interferes with the person’s
intention of naming the ink colour

Question 27

divided attention

Answer 27

can become automatic:
for types of tasks that do not interfere with with other
if tasks are easy
-if well-practiced
Is difficult or impossible when tasks are hard
-can consume a great deal of cognitive resources

Question 28

strayer and johnston

Answer 28

-used a stimulated driving test and discovered that participants on their phone missed twice as many stops
-same with “hands free”

Question 29

attention and visual perception

Answer 29

-attention can improve quality of perception, speed visual processing, and affect if we notice something

Question 30

intentional blindness

Answer 30

a stimulus that is not attended is not perceived, even
though a person might be looking directly at it

Question 31

change blindness

Answer 31

if shown two versions of a picture, differences between
them are not immediately apparent identifying differences requires concentrated attention and
search

Question 32

feature integration theory

Answer 32

proposes that attention is necessary to integrate the
separately analyzed features into coherent objects
(Binding)

Question 33

preattentive stage

Answer 33

-Automatic
-No effort or attention
-Unaware of process
-Object analyzed into features
-Corresponds to feature detection cells in visual cortex

Question 34

focused attention stage

Answer 34

Features are combined if attention is directed to the
location of the objects

Question 35

Ventral Attention Network:

Answer 35

Controls attention based on bottom-up salience (exogenous)

Question 36

Dorsal attention network

Answer 36

controls attention based on top-down information (enogenous

Question 37

executive function network

Answer 37

-controls other attention networks
-directs attention to information needed for current goals
-deals with conflicts between systems, information, habits and goals

Question 38

balints syndrome

Answer 38

Inability to focus attention on individual
objects

Question 39

conjunction searches

Answer 39

Searches for targets that are defined by
having combination (conjunction of
features)