L4 - Attention Bottlenecks Flashcards
What are Serial Bottlenecks?
- Filter points at which it is no longer possible to process incoming perceptual information from our senses in parallel
What are early selection theories?
Selection of information occur early in information processing
What are late selection theories?
Theories of attention proposing that the selection of information occur late in information processing
What is auditory attention?
How we follow one conversation when several people are talking at the same time
What was the auditory attention task?
- Ppts wear set of headphones
- Hear two messages simultaneously (one in each ear)
- Ppts repeat the word from one ear and ignore the other
What did ppts fail to notice in the unattended message (semantic features)?
- Message played backwards
- Several word repetitions
- Message played in a foreign language
What did ppts notice in the unattended message (Physical features)?
- Male/female speaker
- Speech changing from male to female speaker
- Whether human or noise
What is the filter theory?
- Early selection theory
- Sensory info comes through system until it reaches a bottleneck
- Info can be selected based on physical selection criteria e.g ear/pitch
- Person filters out info based on physical characteristics/features
- Attention acts on a perceptual level e.g ear/pitch
What was the dichotic listening task on the filter theory?
1) Introduce name of ppt in the irrelevant channel
- 33% of ppts detect their name (semantic characteristic)
2) Dichotic listening task with message 1: string of numbers, and message 2: meaningful sentence
- Alternated ear meaningful sentence was played
- When asked to report what they listened to, ppts have no problems reporting meaningful sentence correctly = ppts can alternate between channels based on semantic properties of the stimuli = filter must be elsewhere
3) Meanignful message in one ear, meaningless in other
- Meaningful message switched to other ear = some ppts switch ears and shadow the meaningful message, some keep attending the message in first ear
- Means selection of info is flexible and can sometimes selected through physical characteristics AND semantic content
What is the attenuation theory?
- Early Selection Theory
- Sensory info comes through system until it reaches an attenuator
- Info is weakened but not filtered out
- Info can be selected based on a semantic selection criterion
What is the late-selection theory?
- All info is processed completely without attenuation
- Bottleneck is in response system not perceptual
How to determine which filter theory is correct experimentally?
- Monitor percent of shadowing errors after introducing the ppts name in the irrelevant channel
- Filter theory: ppts should only detect their name is attention wanders in the irrelevant channel = More shadowing error BEFORE name is presented
- Attenuation theory: name should activate appropriate lexical unit in memory only weakly = More shadowing error AFTER presentation of the name
- Late-selection theory: ppts detect name routinely = more shadowing error DURING presentation of name
- RESULTS: 34.6% of ppts recall hearing their name in the channel to be ignored, more shadowing error AFTER presentation of the name = attenuation theory
What is the visual shadowing task?
- Ppts watched superimposed videotapes
- Instructed to pay attention to one of the two films and to watch for odd events
- When asked to monitor both films for odd events, ppts experienced great difficulty and missed critical events
What is intentional blindness?
- Refer to phenomenon in which we are unaware what is happening in our direct field of view if we are not paying attention to it
- 5K ppts perform perceptual task in which they judged whether the horizontal or vertical bar of a cross was longer
- Surprise trial where there would be an additional stimulus such as a rectangle would appear on the screen along with the cross
- Ppts were more likely to detect surprise stimuli if it was their name
What was a study on intentional blindness (gorilla)?
- Ppts asked to watch video with two teams and must count number of passes from either team
- In the middle, a person wearing a black gorilla costume walks through the room
- 92% of ppts fail to notice the gorilla when tracking the team in white
