COGNITIVE Week 4: Attention Flashcards
What is attention?
The brain’s mechanism for selection. Things that are payed attention to are selected for further processing
What is exogenous attention?
External information that pops out to us without us having to search for it
Bottom up
What is endogenous attention?
Attention based on task rules and memory such as ooking for Where’s Wally because we turn our attention to specific things
Top down
What is the locus coeruleus?
The brain’s alterting system which tells us when something important is about to happen
How does attention change as we age?
Endogenous attention decreases due to a decline in the frontal cortex
Emotion related information decreases but at a slower rate
Who came up with the filter theory?
Broadbent
What is filter theory?
We block out irrelevent information before the meaning is extracted so only the important messages are focused on
Evidence from the dichotic listening task
What is the dichotic listening task?
People have different speech in either ear and have to focus on one
People aren’t good at focusing on both because we filter out irrelevant information
How do bilingual people disprove filter theory?
When one language is played in each ear, they can pick up bits of both which shows that even though they’re focusing on one, they’re not completely filtering out the second.
What amendment did Triesman make to filter theory?
Irrelevant information isn’t eliminated completely, just deminished
Cocktail party phenomenon where we can still hear our name even though we’re not paying attention
What amendment did Deutsch make to filter theory?
The filter occurs later in the processing stream
What is the visual search paradigm?
We look for a target in a visual display. There could be distractors such as the same shape but in a different colour
What 2 types of searching can be used in the visual search paradigm?
Feature search
Conjunction search
What is feature search?
The characteristics of the target are completely unique so it pops out at us
Bottom up
Not affected by distractors
What is conjunction search?
When the distractors share one or more features with the target so we have to eliminate them one by one
Top down
