Lecture 1 - Attention Flashcards
What are the main characteristics of attention?
Attention is goal-directed, varies in effort, can be shifted, is selective.
What is meant by attention being goal-directed?
-Attention is deployed to achieve something.
-Awareness of attention being goal-directed can be very useful in learning how to manage attention.
What is meant by attention varies in effort?
-Deploying attention can be very easy, or it can be more difficult, for example during visual search.
-Pop-out search tends to be very easy e.g. finding a red dot in a group of black dots, it stands out.
-Serial search tends to be much harder.
What is meant by attention can be shifted?
-The spotlight metaphor – attention is directed to a focused area.
-Scanning from left to right.
-In visual search attention and eye movements are often coupled but not necessarily, you can shift your attention without moving your eyes.
-Attention can be zoomed – the zoom lens metaphor – if we shift our focus to a small part of the scene, something can be much easier to spot.
What is meant by attention is selective?
-Attention as a filter metaphor e.g. decide to focus on one conversation at a party, while ignoring another.
-Attending to one thing means not attending to other things.
-Early modern attention research is dominated by the filter metaphor.
What are some other characteristics of attention?
Attention is limited, can be captured, can be divided.
What is meant by attention is limited?
-Attention as a resource metaphor e.g. trying to listen to two people at the same time.
-You have a limited “amount of attention” and you can “run out of” attention.
-In everyday speech we often talk about “paying attention”.
What is meant by attention can be captured?
-You can control your attention to a certain extent.
-If there are salient or important cues these can capture our attention in a way we can’t entirely manage.
What is meant by attention can be divided?
-E.g. between modalities.
-Dividing attention between visual and auditory modality.
What is the cognitive revolution?
-Started in the 1950s and follows a paradigm shift from behaviourism to cognitivism.
What is Broadbent’s (1952) research?
-Wanted to investigate whether we can understand two simultaneous messages.
-Stimuli: grid with 5 locations, with different symbols in some locations.
-Task: participants heard both:
*“S-1 from G.D.O. Is there a heart on Position 1?”
*“S-2 from G.D.O. Is there a cross on Position 4?“
-Recordings were played simultaneously.
-Various conditions e.g. answer question for S-1, but ignore S-2.
Results:
-Only approx. 50% of questions answered correctly.
-Task was very difficult, even with a limited number of possible alternatives.
What was Cherry’s (1953) research?
-The cocktail-party problem.
-“How do we recognise what one person is saying when others are speaking at the same time?”
-Only one participant – difficult to draw strong conclusions.
Method:
Condition 1: Two messages by same speaker played to both ears (you hear both messages in both ears).
Condition 2: Two messages by the same speaker simultaneously played to different ears (dichotic listening).
Instruction: repeat one message and ignore the other (referred to as shadowing).
Result: task is very difficult but possible after many repetitions. It is much easier to be able to attend to one ear.
What happens to the irrelevant message:
-No words or semantic content reported.
-Change in language was not noticed (e.g. switch from French to Spanish unrecognised).
-Reversed speech was sometimes recognised.
-Change from male to female or to pure tone was recognised.
Results suggest that basic physical stimulus characteristics are processed.
What is Broadbent’s filter theory?
STM -> Selective filter -> Limited capacity channel.
-Limited capacity channel = nightclub.
-Selective filter = bouncers (prevent over-crowding).
-Short-term memory store = the queue.
What does the STM store do?
-Simple physical stimulus properties (e.g. location, pitch, intensity) are processed in parallel.
What are other terms for the STM?
*Sensory register/buffer.
*Immediate memory.
*Iconic/echoic memory.
What does the selective filter do?
identifies information for further processing. The filter uses physical stimulus properties as the basis for selection.
What is the limited capacity channel?
a serial processor – It can only process one thing at a time, therefore other things must wait. Current term is the focus of attention in working memory.
Key aspects of Broadbent’s filter theory?
-Unattended information does not pass the filter.
-Selection/filtering occurs before stimuli are identified/analysed/recognised.
-This means this theory is an early selection theory.
What is Moray’s (1959) and Wood & Cowan’s (1995) own-name effect?
-About 1/3 of participants noticed own name when it was presented to irrelevant ear (the message they have been instructed to ignore).
-It is not possible to recognise words without processing their meaning.
-This suggests that the unattended information was analysed which is not consistent with early selection theory.
What is Treisman’s (1960) message switching?
-Participants report info from irrelevant ear when the message switches from one ear to the other.
-Again: meaning of unattended information was analysed which is not consistent with early selection theory.
Conditioning with electric shocks
-Phase 1: words paired with electric shocks.
-Phase 2: words presented to irrelevant ear.
-Result: words affect skin conductance responses (Corteen & Wood, 1972; Corteen & Dunn, 1974; Forster & Govier, 1978).
-Not consistent with early selection theory.
What is Treisman’s attenuation theory?
-Late selection theory.
-Filter not completely selective.
-This provides explanation for failures of early selection:
*Some concepts in “mental dictionary” more readily available (e.g. own name).
*Relatively weak signal sufficient to activate these concepts.
*Nightclub analogy – you might think of these as VIPs.
What is Deutsch and Deutsch’s (1963) late selection theory?
-Meaning is analysed before input is filtered.
-Late selection models have two central assumptions about the processing of perceptual input:
*It is automatic.
*It is not capacity-limited (everything is fully analysed).
-However, there is very good evidence that these central assumptions are wrong when taken together.
