Lecture 14 Flashcards
Does attention occur before or after perception?
It comes after perception but before object recognition, however, there are some overlaps.
Define attention
There are 3 aspects to this; alerting (maintaining arousal), executive processing (goal orientation and avoiding distractions) and orienting (spatially orienting your mental resources). Attention allows us to selectively process information.
Give an example of an effect that interferes with attention
The stroop effect; this is when coloured words spell out a different colour an we can’t help but attend to the colour of the word, making it harder to read it. This contradicts the idea of attention consisting of selectively processing information. This allows us to focus our auditory attention in public settings (Cocktail party phenomenon).
Discuss the bottle neck vs capacity idea of attention
It’s the idea that we divide our limited mental resources by queuing up the environment input, forming a bottle neck. The capacity idea is the idea that we use different capacities of our mental resources for different tasks/input.
Discuss Cherry’s dichotic listening tasks
One of the tasks in this study was the shadowing task where the participant had to repeat back what they heard in one ear when wearing headphones. They were then asked about the unattended stimuli played in the other ear and the participants didn’t notice that the language changed or that the audio was played backwards. They did notice some physical characteristics like changes in pitch.
Describe Broadbent’s study about auditory attention
List some issues with it
Broadbent believed that attention was either all of nothing in terms of the physical characteristics like tone. This happens to prevent the overloading of consciousness. He does account for the ‘slippage’ of stimuli though which accepts the idea of some attentional shifting. Input happens in parallels, which are then filtered on the basis of their physical characteristics. The information that isn’t attended to waits in the buffer, which accounts for Cherrys findings about information not being attended to undergoing minimal processing. The most prominent characteristics, e.g. which ear, are attended to first. The semantic processing of unattended stimuli is non-existent. However, if irrelevant noise is filtered out, then this doesn’t account for being able to switch our attention and focus on another auditory stimuli. Also, evidence has shown that people still listen to the meaning in the ear they aren’t focusing on and combine the info with the ear they are focusing on. Additionally, when participants were conditioned to expect an electric shock on a specific word when listening to a lost of words, they had elevated skin responses when the word was said in the unattended ear. Therefore, the participants were still processing the meaning of the word. People are also able to detect their name in the unattended ear.
Describe Deutsch et al’s study about attention
They believed that the selection of attention at the same level as the response, so after perception and recognition. This means that all stimuli is fully analysed but the most relevant stimuli determines what response is made. However, this idea wouldn’t make sense as it isn’t cognitively economic.
Describe Treisman’s theory about attention
His idea is the attenuation theory. There are two channels, the stimuli that is attended and the stimuli that isn’t. The unattended channel isn’t completely blocked out, it is just attenuated or ‘turned down’ like turning the volume down on the tv to speak to someone. This happens after the sensory register. The analysis of the stimulus occurs in a hierarchical format and when capacity is reached, the tests at the top of the hierarchy are stopped. So the precise location of the bottleneck is flexible as it depends when capacity is reached. This is called the leaky filter.
According to the three different theories of attention, when does the selection of attention occur for each of them? Early or late?
What did Lavie believe about this?
Broadbent: Early
Treisman: Variable
Deutsch: Late
Lavie believes that selection occurs late and early, depending on the context. If demands are low, we process more than we need earlier and if demands are high, early selection filters are used to control the amount of stimuli analysed. However, if post-perceptual demands are high, then slippage occurs which is when early filters aren’t maintained. Therefore, we need to use late selection filters in this context. Additionally, Lavie stated that as perceptual load increases, perceptual distraction decreases but as cognitive load increases, so does perceptual distraction. This idea accounts for most situations we have in daily life.
What is inattentional blindness?
It’s when we don’t perceive something that is right in front of us because the stimuli isn’t relevant. For example, the invisible gorilla video, you don’t notice the gorilla because you are focusing on the basketball.
What is the pop out effect?
This idea is based on the feature analysis idea, the feature demons aren’t involved. It’s when the target object is extremely dissimilar to the distracter objects so it seems to pop out and all the other features are essentially ignored as they aren’t fully processed. However, if targets and distracters share some features then the pop out is a lot less likely, this is the conjoint search. Additionally, faces can cause a pop out effect supporting the idea of face processing as special.
What is the feature integration theory?
This was developed by Triesman. It’s the idea that the features of an object, like colour, are separable from the object itself. An attention independent parallel occurs to recognise the features, then a slower process occurs to combine the features. This requires active attention to attend to the location of the object and stored knowledge also influences the integration. So attention binds features together to create coherent perception. However, there are issues with this because if you see an upside down T mixed in with upright Ts, it’s easy to spot, even though it shares all of the same features. This is where the attentional engagement theory comes in
What is the attentional engagement theory?
It’s the idea that when searching for an object within distracters, the time in which you pick out the object, not only depends on the similarities between the object and the distracters, but it also depends on how similar all of the distracter objects are. Therefore, if all of the distracter objects are similar then it’s easier to pick out the main object.
What is the spotlight model of visual attention?
Posner believed that attention was mainly on locations of objects rather than the features of the object, contrasting with the FIT theory. Your attentional spotlight ranges in the visual world but it can be focused on a particular spatial location enhancing the processing of the stimuli. This supports the zoom-lens model that the scope is expandable at will. The size of this spotlight varies between people, for example, people in team sports need a larger spotlight to attend to multiple objects. Hutterman supported this idea and found that professional team sportsmen had a wider breadth of attention. This spotlight theory accounts for magic tricks as your attention is focused on the trick, not the background.
Discuss some dual task studies about visual attention
The participants had to do two tasks separately and then together. If the participants are told that one task is primary, then the performance on the other task degrades due to the bottleneck (it’s attended to afterwards). If they are told to respond as they wish, then the performance on both tasks degrades. If the two stimuli are different like auditory and visual, then the performance still degrades because there are still similarities in the resources used. This is shown with Strayer et al.’s study; the participants were told to follow a car in front whilst talking to the confederate. The traffic was either busy or quiet. In high density traffic, 3 participants had collisions. Braking was also slower but the distance kept between cars was larger. This was also supporting when experimenters observed random people driving. However, Watson et al. found that some people were really good at multitasking and a memory task did not affect their driving ability.
