Cognitive Psychology Unit 2 Flashcards
stroop effect
delay in reaction time between congruent and incongruent stimuli.
what does the stroop effect demonstrate
people’s inability to ignore the meaning of words
William James famous quote
“Everyone knows what attention is”
exogenous attention
Attention can be drawn by salient stimuli
Endogenous attention
People can pay active attention like in a lecture
divided attention
people can focus on multiple things
focused attention
people can only focus on just one thing
overt attetnion
looking at an object
covert attention
Focusing on one thing with your eyes but paying attention to something else in your periphery
Exogenous attention is (5 things)
fast, automatic, hard to override bottom up, and motivationally relevant events
What does the money and and red/green circle experiment prove?
Value Driven attentional Capture – attention is automatically captured by value even if the value is not relevant anymore
What does the first Posner Cueing Task prove?
attention is drawn by many things
Is attention captured by motion always, offset, onset, not-task related?
onset
Which experiment is evidence that attention is drawn by the onset of motion?
Rectangles turned into Es or Hs and participants had to say if the odd one out is an E or an H. The movements were continuous, static, motion offset, and motion onset. People answered quicker with motion onset condition (static and then starts moving) and people were slowest with continuous motion
It also worked with natural motion with actual mechanical things moving as opposed to pictures on a computer screen → proving that it is the actual motion that caused the difference and not something about the computer
Characteristics of endogenous cueing
strategic, slow, can be overridden, top down, motivationally relevant goals
What are the two possibilities for how endogenous attention works?
enhancing relevant representations and suppressing irrelevant representations
Experiment for evidence of enhancing relevant representations
monkeys looked at light and either looked or attended and looked at it, and higher neural firing rate when stimulus was attended
Evidence for suppressing irrelevant representations
cars, people, and trees experiment which showed that target info was enhanced and distractor info was suprressed
Conclusion about enhancing relevant representations vs suppression irrelavent representations. evidence!
they are not mutually exclusive and the retinotopic map experiment with the attending to center or predefined target showed that there is both enhancement and suppression
Binding Problem
How does the brain know where to focus its attention
Feature Intergration Theory
using different feature maps to be joined (color and square)
What do we use to combine different features?
Focused Attention
Evidence for the feature integration theory:
participants had to report and focus on the numbers and presumably they weren’t putting focused attention on the other colorful shapes –> ended up having illusory conjuctions and reported wrong colorful shapes BUT this did not happen without the focused attention on numbers
illusory conjuctions
psychological effects in which participants combine features of two objects into one object