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Cognitive neuroscience > Cognitive psychology of attention > Flashcards

Cognitive psychology of attention Flashcards

1
Q

What is attention?

A
  • William James (1890): “Everybody knows what attention is”

- Matlin (2005): Attention is a concentration of mental activity

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2
Q

How can attention be moved (broadly)?

A
  • Attention can be driven from within based on our current goals and desires (e.g. getting a high grade in unit)
  • Or it can also be attracted by certain events in the environment around us (e.g. a loud noise in the hallway)
  • These are commonly referred to as voluntary vs reflexive attention, or also endogenous vs exogenous attention
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3
Q

What are the two broad types of attention?

A
  • Voluntary (endogenous) attention

- Reflexive (Exogenous) attention

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4
Q

What is endogenous attention?

A

Voluntary attention

  • Our ability to intentionally attend to something
  • It’s a top-down and goal-directed process
  • Hopefully your attention is focused on the lecture. But there are many more interesting things going on right now that you could be doing. But this material is important for your goals of doing well on the exam and this Unit – so you focus
  • Like to refer to this as our attention being ‘pushed’
    o Pushed from within by something in the environment – goal directed
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5
Q

What is exogenous attention?

A

Reflexive attention
- Attention can also be attracted by certain information or events in our environment
- It’s a bottom-up stimulus-driven process
o Sensory information from the environment captures your attention
- If there was a gun shot in the hallway everyone would turn and pay attention to it
o Your attention would be grabbed or pulled by information happening around you
o Doesn’t matter that it may interfere with your internal goals
- Like to refer to this as our attention being ‘pulled’

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6
Q

What did William James say of attention?

A

“is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts…”

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7
Q

How is attention tested?

A
  • Attention is drawn to the centre of the screen and then a box might appear to capture the attention
    o A target may appear which you have to respond to in the same or different location
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8
Q

What are the types of trials in experiments of attention?

A

Valid trial
Invalid trial
Neutral trial
No cue trial

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9
Q

What is a valid trial?

A

o Your attention was cued to a location, and then the target appeared there
o The target and the focus

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10
Q

What is an invalid trial?

A

o Your attention was cued to one location, and then the target appeared on the opposite side

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11
Q

What is a neutral trial?

A

o Your attention was cued but not to a specific location, so the cues were not informative towards the location of the target

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12
Q

What is a no cue trial?

A

o Your attention wasn’t cued to a specific location, so nothing informative appeared about the location of the target

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13
Q

How is endogenous attention tested?

A
  • Attention drawn to the centre of the screen and then pushed by presentation of a right pointing arrow
  • If attention is pushed to the right, and the target appeared, it would be a valid trial
  • People are faster and more accurate on these types of trials
  • Its not just non-social cues shifting our attention
    o these attentional processes going on all around us
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14
Q

What is the dot probe task?

A
  • In the dot probe task 2 pictures are presented side by side and then dots appear in location of one of the pics
  • Participants must press a button for the dots
    o often it’s the orientation of the dots ( : or .. )
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15
Q

What is generally found in dot probe tasks?

A
  • People are generally faster to make decision about target/dots when they appear behind location where the faces were presented
    o your attention was drawn more to the faces
    o so more of your attention was on the dots
    o so you are faster to make response about them
  • This infers that people have a natural interest in people which directs them to look at them
  • Interestingly, people with autism don’t show this same effect for faces – reduced automatic orienting to faces
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16
Q

What is the spotlight of attention?

A
  • Posner (1980)
  • Attention illuminates part of visual field
    o Illumination can be broad or narrow
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17
Q

What is the “zoom lens” of attention?

A
  • Eriksen & St. James (1986) – building on spotlight of attention
  • The field of attention can be increased or reduced
  • Rate of processing inversely related to size of focus
    o If you have a narrow focus, you will process information very well
    o If you have a broader focus, you won’t process information as well
  • Related to enhanced processing within the focus
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18
Q

Why are car crashes likely to happen?

A
  • Looking but not seeing
    o E.g. fiddling with radio or looking but daydreaming
  • Stimuli being perceived, but at some point along the way to conscious awareness the information is being lost
  • Attention is needed for perception
  • Can have inattentional blindness
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19
Q

How is attention limited?

A
  • Focusing attention means information is processed better within that focus….
  • but information is processed less outside that focus
  • So, items are missed
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20
Q

What are change blindness experiments?

A

o Attention needs to be focused on the location in order to successfully spot the change
o 2 identical pictures are shown one after the other repeatedly
o There is one item that is changed between the pictures, either colour, location, or absence
o You need to spot which item is changed

21
Q

Why is detecting change in surroundings important?

A
  • Highlights that there is something important or different that we have to deal with
  • All perceptual systems are designed to deal with this
22
Q

Give a brief summary of an introduction to attention?

A
  • Attention is a concentration of mental activity
    o other definitions abound
  • Attentional focus has been likened to a “spotlight” – though different ideas about its nature
  • Attending to one item/area means less processing of information outside that area
23
Q

What is dichotic listening?

A
  • Cherry (1953): “cocktail party effect”
    o Cocktail party effect – can easily pay attention to one conversation even if there are many other conversation occurring in the room at the same time. You can also easily focus
24
Q

How can dichotic listening be tested?

A

o Shadowing
o Played different information into both ears
o Participants were told to focus on one ear instead of the other
o Participants mostly attended to the physical properties of the message
o Were unaware if the speaker changed from male to female or changed language form English to German.

25
Q

What did Broadbent (1958) propose in relation to attention?

A

Filter Model

26
Q

What is Broadbent’s (1958) Filter Model?

A
  • Early-selection model
  • Information is first processed by specialised channels
    o e.g. acoustic or visual channels
  • These channels operate simultaneously
  • One of the first information-processing models
  • Sees the attention system as a series of channels
  • Information first processed by specialised channels
  • Information is then brought into a buffer store
27
Q

What are the criticisms of Broadbent’s (1958) Filter Model?

A

o Further experiments showed that during this task, if your name is called out (semantic information) you will attend to it
o So it can’t be a case of this information being filtered out early as you should filter out your name, but it can still grab your attention

28
Q

What did Treisman (1964) propose in relation to attention?

A

Attenuator Model

29
Q

What is Treisman’s (1964) Attenuator Model?

A
  • Early-selection model improving on Broadbent’s filter model
  • Attenuators process stimuli to different degrees
  • Selection is based upon physical characteristics but also semantic relevance and familiarity
    o There and available if the information becomes relevant in some way, it can be processed if we want
  • Attenuators process stimuli to a different degree
    o This is unlike in the filter model where stimuli are processed in an all-or-nothing fashion
    o This allows for simultaneous processing of stimuli from different channels
  • Physical properties still capture and hold attention
    o However, the attenuators are also influenced by previously analysed material
    o e.g. highly familiar or stimuli semantically relevant in the context
30
Q

What are the evaluation points of Treisman’s (1964) Attenuator Model?

A

o Takes account of intrusion of salient information
 E.g. calling name in busy pub
o But how is information selected for processing?
o Assumes unselected information is left to decay in sensory memory
 Therefore, it will have no effect on behaviour
 Is this hypothesis valid?

31
Q

What is the Late Selection Model?

A
  • Deutsch & Deutsch (1963); Norman (1968)
  • Selection happens at the level of memory
  • Expectations are set up dependent upon context of the story
32
Q

What is subliminal priming?

A
  • Dehaene et al. (1998)
  • Information that is not consciously perceived can influence behaviour
  • In this study, the subliminal prime had been processed for meaning (therefore had been attended to)
33
Q

What is the theory of perceptual load?

A
  • Lavie (1995; 2000)
  • Instead of being seen as a filter, attention is seen as ‘a system’ with limited resources
  • How much attention resources does the task demand?
  • Think about learning to drive
34
Q

What is the evidence for the theory of perceptual load?

A

o Experiments of attentional load
o Respond to the following trials about whether the target is a lowercase “x” or “z”
o High versus low load
 The first four trials were easy, then the last few were harder
• OOXOOO
 The distractors were much different to target, so little attention resource used up in task
• NMSKXV
 The distractors similar to targets, therefore more attentional resources needed for task
 We can test effects of attentional load with distractors
• The Distractor = incompatible + Low Load
• The Distractor = neutral + Low Load
• The Distractor = incompatible + High Load
• The Distractor = Neutral + High Load
 Under low load attention is influenced by the incompatible distractors – performance differs
 Under high load there are little attentional resources available – no difference in performance because the distractors are not being ‘processed’ in same way

35
Q

What distractor combinations can we test attentional load with?

A
  • The Distractor = incompatible + Low Load
  • The Distractor = neutral + Low Load
  • The Distractor = incompatible + High Load
  • The Distractor = Neutral + High Load
36
Q

What are the strengths of theory of perceptual load?

A
  • It doesn’t require a filter process – therefore it does not involve such a rigid system
  • See effects with factors associated with task
    o e.g. familiarity, motivation, ability, personality traits
37
Q

What are the weaknesses of theory of perceptual load?

A
  • Does not specify what “load” actually is

- How does it fit into or relate with other models?

38
Q

What is the stroop effect?

A

One list has the colours written in the colour that they say they are. The other list has colours written in a different colour to what it reads.
- It takes longer to read the second list because the attention goes to the meaning with interferes with the colour of the font
o Takes more effort
- The first list is automatic processing because the colour and font are congruent

39
Q

What is controlled processing?

A
  • Schneider & Shiffrin (1977)
  • Effortful, slow and error prone
  • Achieved after few trials
40
Q

What is automatic processing?

A
  • Schneider & Shiffrin (1977)
  • Effortless, fast, outside awareness & uncontrollable
  • Takes numerous trials in order to achieve
41
Q

What is processing like when the target is obvious among distractors?

A
  • It’s easy to find the ‘green T’ amongst the distractors (red T’s)
  • The target actually seems to ‘pop-out’ at you
  • This is example of bottom-up processing (more automatic)
  • Your search to find the target is just as fast even when there are twice as many distractors
42
Q

What is processing like when the target is hard to find among distractors?

A
  • Harder when searching for target with certain combination of features with the distractors (e.g. target = horizontal green T)
  • This involves top-down (controlled) attention strategies to integrate the two features – takes longer
  • This becomes even harder when there are even more distractors present – more distractors = longer times
  • This is because of the top-down processes that are needed (i.e. ‘thinking time’)
43
Q

What continuum is there of processing? And what is the test for this?

A
  • There is a continuum from controlled (top-down) to automatic (bottom-up) behaviour
  • The Stroop test is a classic test of controlled vs. automatic processing (response inhibition)
44
Q

How can driving be linked to attention?

A
  • Driving is a complex task requiring the coordination of many different mental and physical processes
  • Attention needs to be efficiently directed between them
  • Very little in our evolution has prepared us for reacting to split-second events in a half-ton metal box while moving at rapid speed
45
Q

What are the common causes of car crashes?

A 
- Dingus et al. (2006)       
o 100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study 
- Video-recorders in 100 cars
- Recorded 2 million miles of driving
- 82 crashes
- 771 near-misses
- 22% involved using a mobile phone
46
Q

How is use of a mobile phone inhibiting of attention?

A
  • Using a mobile phone disrupts cognitive processes involved in driving (Drews et al., 2008; Strayer et al., 2003)
  • Level of impairment has been likened to driving with a blood alcohol level of .08 (current UK limit)
  • Four times more likely to have an accident if using a mobile phone - using hands-free makes no difference (Redelmeier & Tibshirani, 1997)
47
Q

Is it the holding of the phone with causes the problem while driving?

A

o i.e. a motor impairment from using the phone itself disrupting the driving of the car? – NO!
o In simulators testing driving, reaction to red/green lights in a driving simulator was impaired when drivers communicated via either a hand-held or hands-free device (Strayer & Johnston, 2001)
 Doesn’t seem to be just motor movement, not that simple

48
Q

Is is the conversation with someone which causes the problem with attention while driving?

A
  • Driving and conversing takes up too much of our attentional resources? – NO!
    o Having a conversation is not the problem as having a passenger in the car has been found to reduce the risk of accident (Drews et al., 2008)
    o In driving simulators, when comparing driving and talking with a passenger or someone on the phone, driving was found to be worse performance wise
49
Q

What is found to be causing attentional disruption while driving?

A
  • Drews et al. (2008): advanced driving simulation
  • Driver spoke with a friend either in the simulator or remotely via a mobile phone
  • Driving performance was significantly worse when speaking on the phone vs a passenger
  • The passenger can view the road and therefore is sensitive to the driving conditions
  • As conditions become more demanding:
    o drivers with a passenger reduced their speech rate
    o passengers modified speaking to match road conditions
    o those in the ‘phone-condition’ increased their speech rate (to fill gaps in conversation?)
    o they couldn’t see the road so didn’t modify their speech
  • Speaking via a mobile phone competes for the very limited attention resources we have
  • Telephone use is a task for which the cognitive system did not evolve to deal with
  • Telephone use while driving negatively affects how behaviour and attention are co-ordinated

Cognitive neuroscience (9 decks)

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