L8 - Attention Flashcards
Using the brain is a computer metaphor, what does the ‘Hardware’ and the ‘Software’ refer to?
Hardware: The physical object
Software: The collection of cognitive process that is occurring
What was the Simons and Chabris (1999) Gorilla experiment?
Two groups of teams are passing a basketball back and forth, you are asked to count the white team. Halfway through a gorilla walks through the middle, at the end you are asked whether you saw the gorilla.
What was Simons and Chabris (1999) testing in their experiment?
Selective Attention
What is Selective Attention?
What we actively focus our attention on we can remember better.
What is the “cocktail party effect”?
What is this an example of?
The fact that when you are in a noisy place you are still able to attend to a given conversation and exclude others.
An example of Selective Attention
What is Cherry’s (1953) dichotic listening task?
Different messages are played into each ear and participants have to ignore one and attend to the other.
They ‘shadow’ the attended message by repeating out loud what they are hearing.
What were the results of the Cherry (1953) dichotic listening task?
Participants were aware that there was a message in the unattended audio but had no memory of the information.
They could only notice a difference in language, or pitch (e.g. male to a female).
Describe the Broadbent (1959) Early Selection model of attention.
- Information enters the memory store.
- It is then filtered based upon its characteristics.
- The semantic meaning or content of the message is extracted after the filtering process has occurred.
What did Moray (1959) demonstrate that showed problems with the early selection model of attention?
When the listener’s name was presented in the unattended ear, around 30% of the participants noticed it.
What did Gray and Wedderburn (1960) find that was a problem for the early selection theory of attention?
The attended ear heard “Dear - 7 - Jane”.
The unattended ear heard “ 9 - Aunt - 5”.
Participants heard “Dear Aunt Jane” although they were only told to attend to one ear only.
What is the Attenuator Model of Attention that Treisman (1964) proposed?
Messages pass through an attenuator, which ‘turns up the volume’ on one message and ‘turns it down’ on others.
Even after attenuation certain information in the unattended channel is deemed important enough to be processed.
How is the Early Selection Model of Attention different to the Attenuator Model of Attention?
Early Selection: Information enters the memory store, is filtered and semantic meaning is extracted after filtering.
Attenuator: Information enters, is passed through attenuator which turns up or down the volume depending on the importance and therefore some unattended information deemed important can enter.
Early selection proposes only attended information will enter, attenuator says some still can.
What did MacKay (1973) show about the semantic content of an unattended message?
The semantic content of an unattended message can influence the interpretation of the attended message.
Participants noticed if their name was said in the unattended ear.
What model of attention did the MacKay (1973) lead to?
Describe it briefly.
Late Selection Model of Attention
The semantic meaning of the words is processed prior to filtering.
What did the ‘Stroop’ task show us about unattended information ‘leaking through’?
That the semantic information in the word interferes with our ability to see a certain colour.
We cannot help but be influenced by unattended information.
Participants were asked to report the colour only but found it difficult.
