Exam 2 Flashcards
Attention
The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations.
Selective Attention
Attending to one thing while ignoring others.
During early processing, all stimuli comes in (parallel) and hearing it all, and during later processing, only one stimulus was processed (serial). Doing very little processing on everything you hear initially.
Distraction
One stimulus interfering with the process of another stimulus.
Divided Attention
Paying attention to more than one thing at a time.
Attential Capture
A rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement.
Visual Scanning
Movements of the eye from one location or object to another.
Filter Model of Attention
Model of attention that proposes a filter that lets attended stimuli through and blocks some or all of the unattended stimuli.
Dichotic Listening
Presenting different stimuli to the left and right ears and trying to focus on the stimuli from one of the ears.
Shadowing
Repeating a message out loud as it’s heard. Used in conjunction with dichotic listening experiments.
Cocktail Party Effect
The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli, especially at a party where there are a lot of simultaneous conversations.
Broadbent’s Filter Model
Early selection model
Broadbent proposed that info passes through sensory memory, filter, and detector.
Filter by physical characteristics (gender, location, pitch), which are processed early.
1) Sensory memory holds all the incoming info for a fraction of a second and then transfers all of it to the filter.
2) The filter identifies the message that is being attended to based on its physical characteristics (things like the speaker’s tone of voice, pitch, speed of talking, and accent) and lets only this attended message pass through to the detector.
3) The detector processes the info from the attended message to determine higher-level characteristics of the message, such as its meaning. Because only the important, attended info had been let through the filter, the detector processes all of the info that enters it. Processes the meaning.
4) The output of the detector is sent to STM and also transfer info into LTM.
Messages->->-> sensory store->->-> filter-> detector-> memory.
Bottleneck Model (Broadbent’s Model of Attention)
Model of attention that proposes that incoming info is restricted at some point in processing, so only a portion of the info gets through to consciousness.
Treisman’s Attenuation Model of Selective Attention
Early selection model.
Messages ->->->-> attenuator –>->->-> dictionary unit -> memory.
This changes the strength of the messages. All messages go through but filtered by physical properties.
Attenuator
Analyzes the incoming message in terms of: 1) its physical characteristics whether it’s high-pitched or low-pitched, fast or slow; 2) its language (how the message groups into syllables or words); 3) its meaning (how sequences of words create meaningful phrases).
Dictionary Unit
Contains words, store in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated. For example, your name has a low threshold, which means it’s easily detected. It lets the message get through if it’s strong enough.
Late Selection Models of Attention
Proposed that most of the incoming info is processed to the level of meaning before the message to be further processed is selected.
Messages->->-> physical analysis->->-> meaning analysis-> memory.
Meaning is processed later compared to the early selection models.
Processing Capacity
Refers to the amount of info people can handle and sets a limit on their ability to process incoming info.
Perceptual Load
Related to the difficulty of a task.
Low-Load Tasks
Tasks that use few resources, leaving some capacity to handle other tasks (easy tasks).
High-Load Tasks
Tasks that use most or all of a person’s resources and so leaves little capacity to handle other tasks (difficult tasks).
Load Theory of Attention
Proposal that the ability to ignore task-irrelevant stimuli depends on the load of the task the person is carrying out. High-load tasks result in less distraction. For low-load tasks, there’s still processing capacity left. So there are still resources available to process task-irrelevant stimulus, which slows down reaction time.
Overt Attention
Shifting attention from one place to another by moving the eyes. Attending where your eyes are looking.
Covert Attention
Shifting attention from one place to another while keeping the eyes stationary. Attending to where your eyes aren’t looking.
Central Vision
Area you are looking at. Objects here fall on fovea, better detail vision than peripheral retina on which everything else falls.