L1. Attention Flashcards
Attention
- cognitive resource which enables cognitive processing to take place, it selects what information is going to be processed
cognitive psychology
- Concerned with human information processing
- Humans attend to, encode, store, transform, update, retrieve, reason with and communicate information
Understand distinction between focused and divided
attention
Focused attention/selective attention
- individuals try and attend to only one source of information while ignoring other stimuli
divided attention
- two tasks are preformed at the same time (multitasking)
Describe main filter theories of attention
Early filter theories
Cherry (1953)
- Dichotic listening task different things in both ears, physical characteristics differ
- Focusing on one is difficult if both messages in same voice à we use physical features to focus attention
- Participants must shadow what they heard in the attended ear (repeat)
- Participants were poor at retrieving information and didn’t notice if message was in another language or played backwards
Moray (1959)
- Presented the same word list in the unattended ear 35 times
- Participants were at chance on later recognition test
Broadbent (1958)
- Parallel access to very short-term sensory register
- Early attentional filter
- Single channel of information selected on basis of physical characteristics to pass through filter into shortterm
memory for further (e.g. semantic) processing
criticisms of early filter
Treisman’s dichotic listening task (1960)
- Semantic meaning of the sentences switched ear halfway through
- “To make a cake, you need pianos, clarinets, and drums”
- “The instruments included butter, sugar, and eggs”
- Most people switched ears to follow message even though they were asked to follow one ear therefore:
- Filter must be sensitive to content
Corteen & Wood (1972)
- Participants required to listen to list of words
- Electric shock when city names were presented
- Then: Shadowed message in one ear, presented with irrelevant words (including city names) in unattended ear
- Participants were unable to report information presented in unattended ear
- But: increased galvanic skin response (a physiological measure of arousal) to city names à Unconsciously analysing words for meaning
Early filter theory criticisms
- Highly salient infor is often detected
- Semantic content of unattended information can cause attention to be directed towards it
Must be processed to some extent
later filter theories
Later filter theories
Deutsch & Deutsch (1963)
- All stimuli fully analysed
- Most important stimulus determines response or further processing
- Little support for this theory
Not consistent with dichotic listening studies
attenuation (variable filter) theory
- Filter attenuates analysis of unattended information (doesn’t block it completely)
- A combination of late and early filter theories
Describe nature of visual selective attention
Can resemble a spotlight:
- Small region of enhanced visual processing; anything falling outside the spotlight is harder to “see”
- Spotlight can be moved to different locations
- not supported in study where time to make same/different judgement did not vary with distance
Inconsistent with idea of moving spotlight
a zoom lens:
- Area of focal attention can be increased or decreased depending on task demands
- criticised in study where they showed Showed that attention is object based and not space based
or multiple spotlights
Explain the difference between disjunctive and conjunctive
search
Disjunctive search
- There exists (at least) one feature that differentiates the target from (all) distractors
- Easier, more efficient, parallel search
- No matter how many distractor items the search will be easy
Conjunctive search
- Only a combination of multiple features differentiates the target from the distractors
- More difficult, effortful, serial search the more items the longer the search
Describe Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory
According
to the theory, we need to distinguish between object features (e.g., colour; size; line orientation) and the objects themselves. There are two processing stages:
(1) Basic visual features are processed rapidly and pre-attentively in parallel across the visual scene.
(2) Stage (1) is followed by a slower serial process with focused attention providing the “glue” to form objects from the available features
(e.g., an object that is round and has an orange colour is perceived
as an orange). In the absence of focused attention, features from
different objects may be combined randomly producing an illusory
conjunction.
Illusory conjunction:
Mistakenly combining
features from two
different stimuli to
perceive an object that is
not present. evidence for feature integration
Name factors that determine dual-task performance
- task difficulty
- task similarity (verbal/visual modality, verbal/manual response)
- practice (strategies, reduced attentional task demands)
Describe central capacity vs. multiple resource theories of
divided attention
Central attentional capacity theories
- One “pool” of attention
- Central capacity can be allocated flexibly across tasks
- Resource is strictly limited theory is that:
○ combined demands < total resource = no interference
○ combined demands > total resource = performance decrements
- Explains why difficult tasks (e.g., random number generation) interfere with any other task, even easy & dissimilar one (e.g., tone detection)
Multiple resource theories
- Multiple resource theories
- Several independent pools of attention (modules)
- Similarity in task = resource competition = interference
- Explains why similar tasks interfere with each other even if easy (e.g. manual movement tracking and tone detection with manual response; McLeod, 1977) eh patting head and rubbing tummy
understand the terms “cognitive bottleneck” and “psychological refractory period”
Psychological refractory period (PRP)
- When 2 stimuli are presented in close succession (e.g., 100 ms stimulus-onset asynchrony), the response to the 2nd one is slowed
It is often argued task performance involves three successive stages: (1) perceptual; (2) central response
selection; and (3) response execution.
The response selection stage of the second task cannot begin until the
response selection stage of the first task has finished, although the
other stages . . . can proceed in parallel . . . according to this model,
the PRP effect is a consequence of the waiting time of the second task
because of a bottleneck at the response selection stage
