Lecture 13: Attention

Question 1

what is attention?

Answer 1

• it is what allows us to selectively process some things and not others.
• we can selectively attend to stimuli even when they are presented almost o top of each other.

Question 2

what can attention refer to?

Answer 2

• Alerting - maintaining arousal ready to function.
• Executive processing - selective goal oriented pro essing of some things while avoiding the distracting influence of others.
• Orienting - spatial orienting of metal resources.

Question 3

what is the stroop effect?

Answer 3

*when your processing of the words is automatic and interferes with your naming of the colour the words is printed in.

Question 4

what is Cherry’s (1953) cocktail party phenomenon?

Answer 4

• when in a room where multiple people are talking, we can attend to one persons speech, ignoring others.
• but sometimes we can switch our attention either at will or seemingly involuntarily to another source.

Question 5

What is broadbent’s (1958) theory?

Answer 5

• proposed unattended stimuli only undergo minimal processing before being filtered.
• Accounts for cocktail party and dichotic listenkng task.

Question 6

What was Broadbent’s procedure?

Answer 6

• If he was correct then the information in the unattended ear should have been ignored and participants should report A,2,C but they did not.
• They reported A,B,C,1,2,3 - in other words they must have been attending to the meaning of the information in the unattended ear.
• Participants were conditioned to expect an electric shock when a particular word was presented.
• Conditioned participants then showed the elevated galvanic skin response (GSR) in when the word squirrel was heard in the unattended ear.
• In other words, even though they were supposedly unaware of the stimuli presented in the unattended channel, they still processed its meaning.

Question 7

What were the limitations of Broadbent’s model?

Answer 7

• The theory fails to account for
• Why some individuals detect their own name in the unattended channel.
• The ability to group information from hte unattended channel when similar to that in the shadowed channel.
• The existence of implicit learning from the unattended stream, despite explicit unawareness.

Question 8

When does selection occur?

Answer 8

• Attentional shifts can be very fast (50ms)
• it is possible to quickly shift between stimulus streams.
• Slippage could account fir occasional semantic processing of unattended stimuli.
• Therefore, Broadbent’s theory might have been correct that semantic processing of unattended stimuli should be impossible.

Question 9

What did Lavie (2005) argue?

Answer 9

• For both early and late selection depending on context.
• We have a lot of perceptual resources, and we are inclined to use them.
• if perceptual demands are high, we use early selection filters to process things from only one channel.
• If perceptual demands are low, we tend to process more than we need.

Question 10

What were Lavie’s model predictions?

Answer 10

• As perceptual load increases, perceptual distraction decreases.
• As cognitive load increases, perceptual distraction increases.
• This is useful because it guides how to predict whether an important task will be susceptible to distraction.

Question 11

What is the feature integration theory (FIT)?

Answer 11

• Treisman (1988, 1992)
• Features of objects (colour, size, orientation) are separable from the objects itself.
• Rapid initial parallel process to identify features.
• attentional - independent.
• Then a slower, serial process to form objects from combining features.
• Attention is therefore the visual glue that binds features together into a coherent percept.
• However, for example, it should be difficult to see the upright T because upright and upside down T’s share the same features. - but it isn’t.

Question 12

What is Attentional engagement theory (AET)?

Answer 12

• Argue that search time depends not only on the similarity between the target and distracter but also on the degree of similarity in the distracters themselves.
• Difficult vs easy, search tasks depending on similarity between target and distracters.

Question 13

What is Location based attention?

Answer 13

• Posner (1980)
• Attentional spotlight model
• Ranges over the entire visual world can be focused on a particular spatial location to enhance the processing stimuli within its beam.
• Eriksen and St. James (1986)
• Zoom lens model.
• Scope is expandable at will.

Question 14

How can magic tricks deceive our attention?

Answer 14

• Your attention is focused on the trick, not on what is going on in the background.
• *The conjuror attempts to direct your attentional spotlight to an irrelevant spatial location so you don’t see how the trick is done.

Question 15

What are dual task studies?

Answer 15

• Do 2 tasks alone and the together.
• See how/whether performance degrades when done together.
• If participants are told that one task is primary, performance on the second task degrades while performance on the primary task doesn’t.
• If participants are told to respond as they wish, there is degradation to both.

Question 16

How do we manage attention across different modalities?

Answer 16

• Tasks that use different senses do not use completely different resources.
• visual vs auditory input.
• Manual vs verbal responses.
• Spatial vs verbal code of information.

Question 17

What was Strayer, Drews and Johnston’s (2003) theory?

Answer 17

• Driving task: follow a car ahead on the road. Brake when the car brakes, keeping a safe distance.
• Mobile phones: Converse with confederate about an interesting topic. 50% talking, 50% listening.
• Number of cards in adjacent lane was zero or a lot.
• All participants had driving licenses; most had mobile phones.

Question 18

What were the results of the Strayer, Drews and Johnston’s (2003) theory?

Answer 18

• In high density traffic, while talking, 3 of 40 participants had collisions.
• Braking was slower when on a mobile phone.
• People on mobile phones kept a bigger distance
• 2.4m difference in low density traffic
• 3.5m difference in high density traffic.

Question 19

What did Watson and Strayer (2010) say about multi - tasking?

Answer 19

• Compared driving without distraction to driving while doing a challenging working memory span test.
• Out of 200 participants, 5 were identified as super taskers, doing individual tasks well and showing no deficit at doing the two tasks at once.

Question 20

What is Hemispatial neglect?

Answer 20

• Lesion to the Parietal Associative Cortex.

* People ignore a part of their body and/or their external world on the side opposite to the lesion.