L1 - Attention & Distraction Flashcards
What happens to sensory input?
- Not everything we see/hear enters consciousness, looking is not noticing
Describe the Stroop Task
- 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
What is the interference effect?
- When the reaction time is slower in the incongruent condition than the neutral
- The meaning of the word interferes with ink colour
What is the facilitation effect?
- The matching word helps remember the ink colour
- Congruent reaction time is faster than neutral
What is selective attention?
- Process that controls awareness of categories of events in our environment
- Allows us to select some messages over others
Why do we need selective attention
Limited capacity for conscious processing
What does the Stroop Test do cognitively?
- Causes two attentional processes to have conflict
What are the two attentional processes in conflict?
Controlled processing: (deliberate)
- Mental effort
- Limited
- Can be distracted
Automatic processing: (obligatory)
- Happens without effort
- Causes distraction when incongruent with focal task
How do the two attentional processes help each other (with study)
- 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
Describe the Posner cueing paradigm (endogenous)
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
Describe the Posner cueing paradigm (exogenous)
- Fixation point, stimulus that catches attention (automatic), target comes up where attention was previously drawn
Exo = reflexive automatic attention
What are the models of selective attention
- 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
Describe early selection in more detail
- Multiple sensory inputs
- Sensory analysis of the input
- Selective filter what gets processed, what enters STM & how we respond
Describe late selection in more detail
- 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
What is the dichotic listening experiment?
- Ppts wear headphones, told to pay attention to one side only
- Other side has other information, but ppt were told to ignore this information
How does the dichotic listening experiment support early selection?
- 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
How does the dichotic listening experiment support late selection?
- 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
What is wrong with the stroop test?
Both are attributes of the same stimulus, but cant be measured separately
What is Priming?
- 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
What did patients with issues in their frontal lobe do?
- Did not suffer from negative priming, instead it enhanced their attention
What is the attenuation model?
- Unattended materials are processed in a weakened form
What is the adaptive significance and the control of behaviour for this?
- 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
