Cognitive Psychology - Attention and Distraction

Question 1

What does The Stroop Task involve/look like?

Answer 1

• Colour naming errors
• Congruent list < Control list < Incongruent list
  E.g. RED (red coloured) etc < XXXXX (blue coloured) etc < BLUE (green coloured) etc

Question 2

Who developed The Stroop Task

Answer 2

J. Ridley Stroop (1935)

Question 3

What is selective attention?

Answer 3

A process that controls our awareness of particular categories of events in our environment

Question 4

What does selective attention allow us to do?

Answer 4

Select one “message” and suppress others

Question 5

Who said that we need selective attention?

Answer 5

Broadbent (1958)

Question 6

Why do we need selective attention?

Answer 6

Broadbent (1958): Brain has limited capacity for conscious processing

Question 7

What is The Stroop Effect?

Answer 7

An experimental paradigm that allows us to study selective attention mechanisms

Question 8

How does The Stroop Effect work?

Answer 8

• Stroop incongruent condition creates a situation where 2 attention processes are in conflict with each other, allowing us to measure their effect on each other

Question 9

Place the colour/word conditions in order of quickest to slowest reaction times

Answer 9

Congruent < Neutral < Incongruent

Question 10

What are the 2 key types of processing?

Answer 10

Automatic and Controlled

Question 11

How can attention be controlled?

Answer 11

Via automatic versus controlled processing

Question 12

What is the main difference between controlled and automatic processing?

Answer 12

Controlled processing is deliberate, while automatic processing is obligatory

Question 13

Describe controlled processing

Answer 13

• Involves ‘mental effort’
• Limited (Broadbent, 1958)
• Subject to distraction

Question 14

Describe automatic processing

Answer 14

• Happens independently of ‘effort’
• Causes distraction when incongruent with the focal task and facilitation when congruent

Question 15

How can we study attention processes?

Answer 15

• In tasks where they are in conflict with each other (Stroop incongruency combined with congruency or neutral trials)
• In tasks where they help each other (object-action compatibility)

Question 16

Why do we need attention?

Answer 16

• So that we don’t waste limited resources processing irrelevant info. We can focus our attention to enhance processing of relevant info (Posner et al., 1980)
• Focus of attention on context/goal relevant info

Question 17

Can automatic and controlled processes be biased by cues?

Answer 17

Yes, both automatic and controlled processes can be biased by cues (Posner paradigm: exogenous/endogenous cueing effects)

Question 18

Who conducted an experiment on object-action compatibility?

Answer 18

Ellis, R (2009) - cup study, what hand did they use to grasp

Question 19

What are the 2 kinds of Models of selective attention?

Answer 19

Early selection models and Late selection models

Question 20

What do early selection models argue?

Answer 20

Items that are not attended to will not get selected for perceptual processing

Question 21

What do late selection models argue?

Answer 21

All information is attended and gets selected later on in the processing chain

Question 22

Who looked at ‘early’ selection - limitations on processing?

Answer 22

Broadbent (1958)

Question 23

Give the order of Broadbent’s (1958) ‘early’ selection model on limitations on processing

Answer 23

Multiple sensory Inputs > Sensory analysis > Selective filter (Bottleneck) > Perceptual filter > Perceptual system > Short-Term memory > Further analysis (meaning etc) > Response

Question 24

What theory did Broadbent propose?

Answer 24

The Bottleneck theory - info and stimuli are filtered so most important info is perceived (limited capacity)

Question 25

Who looked at ‘late’ selection - limitations on responding?

Answer 25

Deutsch and Deutsch (1963)

Question 26

Give the order of Deutsch and Deutsch’s (1963) ‘late’ model on limitations on responding

Answer 26

Multiple Sensory Inputs > Sensory analysis > Perceptual system > Short-term memory > Further analysis (e.g. meaning) > Selective filter (Bottleneck) > Response

Question 27

What do studies into dichotic listening (shadowing) show?

Answer 27

• Listeners can tell if unattended message is voice or noise, male or female (superficial, physical aspects of input), but can’t report anything that was said (even single words repeated many times), or even if it was in a foreign language.
  But…
• In later recall tests, meaning of non-attended message was processed (answer depends on how the dependent variable is measured)

Question 28

Who looked at the Attenuation model (as a compromise) - weakened processing of unattended information?

Answer 28

Treisman (1964)

Question 29

Give the order of Treisman’s (1964) Attenuation model

Answer 29

Multiple Sensory Inputs > Sensory analysis > Attenuating filter (Bottleneck - unattended info is weakened, physical features filtered out) > selective filter > Perceptual filter > Perceptual system > Short-Term Memory > Response

Question 30

How do we know that unattended information is processed?

Answer 30

• Dichotic listening studies have shown that unattended channel can influence responses (auditory modality)
• Priming studies have shown that unattended information can influence responses (visual modality)

Question 31

What is priming?

Answer 31

Exposure to 1 stimulus influences the processing of a subsequent target stimulus without conscious guidance or intention

Question 32

What are the 2 types of priming?

Answer 32

Positive priming and Negative priming

Question 33

What is the the difference between positive and negative priming in terms of their effect on processing

Answer 33

• Positive priming enhances processing of target (faster naming times, less errors)
  whereas
• Negative priming inhibits processing of target (slower naming times, more errors)

Question 34

What does research into priming tell us about frontal lobe patients?

Answer 34

Metzler & Parkin (2000): Frontal lobe patients show positive instead of negative priming (deficits in distractor suppression not target facilitation)

Question 35

What is negative priming?

Answer 35

When unattended information influences subsequent responding i.e. must’ve been processed to an extent

Question 36

Who proposed the Attenuation model?

Answer 36

Treisman (1964)

Question 37

What does the attenuation model tell us about negative priming?

Answer 37

Treisman (1964): Unattended material is processed in a weakened, attenuated form

Question 38

what did Cherry (1953) do?

Answer 38

Conducted some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears