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
What is Balint’s Syndrome due to
Due to damage to parieto-occipital lobes on both sides
What does Balint’s Syndrome cause
Impairment in focusing attention
Impairment with feature integration
if a patient cant say the right color of a letter or see objects right in front of face, what syndrome might they have?
Balint’s Syndrome
What is hemispatial Neglect due to
Damage to only one side in the angular gyrus
What does hemispatial neglect cause
Impairment attending one side side of space
What does the stroop effect demonstrate
how automatic processing can interfere with intended processing
In Schneider and Shiffrin’s experiment, in which particapants were asked to indicate whether a target stimulus was present in a series of rapidly presented “frames”, divided attention was easier when___
processing had become automic
when does automatic process occur
when tasks are well-practiced
What are attentions functions? (2)
to enhance processing of relavent information and to bind features into objects
what are attention’s limitations
only a few elements at the same time
What is feature search?
focusing on just one feature when searching
what is conjuction search?
looking at a combination of features when searching which makes it hard
What type of processing does feature search entail?
parallel
What type of processing does conjunction search entail?
serial processing
Which is easier: feature or conjunction search?
feature
Is conjuction search quicker when the target is absent or present and by how much?
Present and by 2x because you stop looking when you find the target
Which experiment did we use in class to discuss feature and conjuction search?
blue and red lines and looking for red vertical line
What is feature integration theory?
binding multiple features together
How does parallel processing relate to feature search?
The time it takes
to evaluate 1 item, is
identical to the time it takes
to evaluate n items
What did we initially think about primitive features?
that they are percieved quickly with parallel processesing and without focal attention in feature search
What did we initially think about binding features?
that they require focal attention and are serially processed in conjuction searhc
What complicates the idea that primative features are processed w parallel processing and that binding features is processed with conjuction search?
Sometimes images have feature search and conjunction search combined like all blue vertical lines in one area and a red vertical line in the middle but a lot of red lines horizontally
and sometimes feature seach can be really difficult like finding diagonal lines in other diagonal lines
why is it hard to tell the difference between one diagonal line to another
they are not very salietn
Visual Salience
Features are more dissimilar or more unique so items pop out and are exogenous
What type of guidance do you use for Salient Features
bottom up guidance
If there is no bottom up guidance what do you need to use?
endogenous control and you need to inspect items serially
What type of guidance can we use to process different streams of information in parallel
top down guidance
Evidence Against Broadbent’s Early Selection Model
Cocktail Party Effect
Explain the dichotic listening expriment and what it proves
A sentence was repeated in one ear. In the other ear, a participants heard 8 boring words 35 times
The participants were supposed to only listen to the sentence and they could ignore the words but if the words contained their own name, then the participants were able to hear their names and couldn’t ignore it – cocktail party effect
Proves: brain must be encoding for meaning which goes against broadbent’s early selection model
What model of attention was created to address the problems with the early selection model
Treisman’s Attenuator Model
How does Treisman’s Attenuator Model differ from the early selection model
Each unit has a threshold it must meet before it becomes consciously available so we process some amount of semantic meaning before higher order processing
Do our own names have high or low thresholds in the Attenuator Model
very low
What experiement proves that the Attenuator model has truth to it?
Heard the sentence “they threw stones at the bank” in one ear and heard the word river or money in the other eye
They then said what the word bank referred to
PROVES: that everything gets processed → even stuff we are supposed to ignore gets processed and influences higher order processing even if we are unaware of it
What are the two steps of Attenuator model?
Attenuator –> Dictionary Unit
What are the three steps of the late selection model?
Sensory store –> semantic analysis –> higher order processing
A task is automatic if:
It doesn’t require attention
Occurs outside of consciousness
It is ballistic (if you start it, it keeps going)
What is more automatic: reading or color naming?
reading
Why is reading more automatic than color naming?
We’ve spent our entire lives reading, so it is automatic – when you look at a word, the meaning just comes to you
Which experiments proves tasks can be automatic when trained and that automaticity is relative
Color Shape Training Task: Participants linked shapes to colors for 20 days in a row
And eventually after the 20 days, they did the stroop version with congruent and incongruent trials
Task with target as numbers and frames as mostly letters as initial phase and then swapped to reverse phase
What two things are needed for automaticity?
Practice and Consistency
In terms of something becoming automatic what comes first: top down problem solving or bottom up recognition
top down problem solving BECOMES bottom up recognition with practice and consistency
how often do people’s minds wander
47% of the time
are ppl happy or unhappy while midns are wandering
unhappy
What does more mind wandering correlate to and what experiment proves this
worse working memory and the expriment were individuals were asked to do a sustained-attention-to-response task which measures the degree of mind wandering and then a working memory task where they remembered phone numbers
