L6: Attention Focused

Question 1

What is focused attention/selective attention?

Answer 1

A situation in which individuals try to attend to only one source of information while ignoring other stimuli

Question 2

What is divided attention?

Answer 2

A situation in which two tasks are performed at the same time (multitasking)

Question 3

How do we focus in on one conversation at a time? (Cocktail party problem)

Answer 3

Sound segregation: using physical differences to decide which sounds belong together (also can pay attention to one stream better as long as there is a physical difference between the two streams ie one is high pitch the other is low pitch)

-focusing attention to a chosen auditory message

Question 4

At what level do we process auditory information in channels that are unattended?

Answer 4

-1/3 participants reported hearing their name in an unattended channel in a dichotic test

Question 5

What did Johnsrude find in relation to the cocktail party problem

Answer 5

• a familiar voice is both easier to pay attention and easier to ignore
• we use own experiences of the world to solve the cocktail party problem (top-down)

Question 6

Outline Broadbents theory of attention selection

Answer 6

• initial parallel stage (input into sensory register)
• inputs then filtered out in basis of physical characteristics. Prevents information/sensory overload
• important stuff passes through the filter (into STM so on so on)

Question 7

Evaluate broadbents theory

Answer 7

Positive
-accounts for cherry’s basic findings: unattended stimuli only undergo minimal processing before being filtered

-accounts for findings from dichotic listening task: filter selects an input on the basis of the most prominent physical characteristic distinguishing the inputs

Limitations
-doesn’t account for semantic proc sing of unnatended ear

-doesn’t account for the existence of implicit learning from the unattended stream, despite explicit unawareness

Question 8

Outline Treismans attenuation theory

Answer 8

• unattended information is attentuated after the sensory register
• bottleneck (a point where our ability to process two or more simultaneous inputs is limited)is flexible,

It’s basically just a general theory for selective attention. Not gonna lie, don’t really get it

Question 9

Outline Deutsch and Deutsch theory of attention selection

Answer 9

• all stimuli fully analysed, bottleneck occurs late, before the response
• the most relevant stimulus determines which response is made
• evidence from ERPs: bottleneck occurs earlier (favours treisman theory)

Question 10

Outline perceptual load theory

Answer 10

• carries on from treisman model sort of
• we have a limited capacity to process things
• if we haven’t used up all our attention on the thing we are paying attention to, the resources left over are used to process the other stuff. When capacity is not exhausted by target processing, remaining resources are engaged in distractor processing.
• obviously if there are no resources left over then there are no resources to process distractors.

Question 11

Outline neuroimaging findings related to cognitive load (the celebrity stroop test one)

Answer 11

-in the high load condition, distracting items are processed more (contarary to a typical perceptual load experiment e.g. IDENTIFY the x with distractors, which finds that distractors are only distracting when we have enough resources available to process them, and so distractors have minimal effect in these high load conditions in this case)

Question 12

Outline the limitations of load theory

Answer 12

• oversimplified (eg hain et al showed that human faces are always difficult to ignore even under high load conditions
• perceptual load manipulation is typically confounded by set-size.results can be explained by a low-level perceptual account (dilution) rather than by an attentional (resources) related account

Question 13

Dilution

Answer 13

You’re processing so much stuff that everything is processed less