L1 - Attention & Distraction

Question 1

What happens to sensory input?

Answer 1

• Not everything we see/hear enters consciousness, looking is not noticing

Question 2

Describe the Stroop Task

Answer 2

• Control list = neutral letter strings, nothing to do with colour
• Congruent list = where colour is also word
• Incongruent list = diff colour, diff word
• Measuring how long it takes to name the ink colour, and number of errors
• Example of selective attention

Question 3

What is the interference effect?

Answer 3

• When the reaction time is slower in the incongruent condition than the neutral
• The meaning of the word interferes with ink colour

Question 3

What is the facilitation effect?

Answer 3

• The matching word helps remember the ink colour
• Congruent reaction time is faster than neutral

Question 4

What is selective attention?

Answer 4

• Process that controls awareness of categories of events in our environment
• Allows us to select some messages over others

Question 5

Why do we need selective attention

Answer 5

Limited capacity for conscious processing

Question 6

What does the Stroop Test do cognitively?

Answer 6

• Causes two attentional processes to have conflict

Question 7

What are the two attentional processes in conflict?

Answer 7

Controlled processing: (deliberate)
- Mental effort
- Limited
- Can be distracted

Automatic processing: (obligatory)
- Happens without effort
- Causes distraction when incongruent with focal task

Question 8

How do the two attentional processes help each other (with study)

Answer 8

• Object-action compatibility effect
• Ppts see a cup with handle on one side or not, asked if object is the right way up
• One condition: press with left hand, other condition use right hand
• People are faster when handle is right when they use right finger, vice versa
• Automatic processes are for optimising behaviour for environment

Question 9

Describe the Posner cueing paradigm (endogenous)

Answer 9

Congruent endogenous:
- Fixation point, arrow (conscious looking), fixation point, number where arrow said it would be

Incongruent endogenous:
- Fixation point, arrow (conscious looking), fixation point, number not where arrow said it would be

Slower reaction time in incongruent conditon

Endo = must pay attention to it voluntarily

Question 10

Describe the Posner cueing paradigm (exogenous)

Answer 10

• Fixation point, stimulus that catches attention (automatic), target comes up where attention was previously drawn

Exo = reflexive automatic attention

Question 11

What are the models of selective attention

Answer 11

• Early selection models: Items not attended to will not get selected for perceptual processing
• Late selection models: All information is attended to and gets selected later in the processing chain

Question 12

Describe early selection in more detail

Answer 12

• Multiple sensory inputs
• Sensory analysis of the input
• Selective filter what gets processed, what enters STM & how we respond

Question 13

Describe late selection in more detail

Answer 13

• Multiple sensory input
• Sensory analysis for everything
• Perceptual system and STM for every input
• We also do further analysis for everything
• JUST BEFORE we respond, we put a selective filter on

Question 14

What is the dichotic listening experiment?

Answer 14

• Ppts wear headphones, told to pay attention to one side only
• Other side has other information, but ppt were told to ignore this information

Question 15

How does the dichotic listening experiment support early selection?

Answer 15

• When asked to report what happened in the wrong ear, they cannot do so other than basic details like a woman spoke
• People process sensory features of info but not meaning

Question 16

How does the dichotic listening experiment support late selection?

Answer 16

• Correct ear had words that were ambiguous e.g bank
• Wrong ear played synonyms of one meaning of the word e.g river, flood, swim etc
• Recall asked between two sentences
• More people recalled the meaning in the wrong ear, which means the meaning of the non-attended message was processed

Question 17

What is wrong with the stroop test?

Answer 17

Both are attributes of the same stimulus, but cant be measured separately

Question 18

What is Priming?

Answer 18

• Exposure to one stimulus (cue) influences processing of another target stimulus without conscious intention
• Positive priming enhances processing of target e.g cat/dog
• Negative priming inhibits processing of target, slower and make errors

Question 19

What did patients with issues in their frontal lobe do?

Answer 19

• Did not suffer from negative priming, instead it enhanced their attention

Question 20

What is the attenuation model?

Answer 20

• Unattended materials are processed in a weakened form

Question 21

What is the adaptive significance and the control of behaviour for this?

Answer 21

• Cocktail party effect: busy room and someone says name and you turn
• We want a flexible system that responds even when we are not paying attention