Lecture 2

Question 1

What was Cherry’s finding in the dichotic listening task?

Answer 1

Subjects did not notice if unattended message was foreign or reversed speech, but noticed if it was a pure tone or male/female voice
= only physical characteristics are processed in the unattended message

Question 2

Who came up with the ‘cocktail party phenomenon’?

Answer 2

Moray (1959)

Question 3

What is the ‘cocktail party phenomenon’?

Answer 3

Allows individuals to select or focus on one process which tuning out others. Includes hearing something significant/important in a conversation that they are not directly engaged in e.g. own name

Question 4

What are three things that Moray found?

Answer 4

1. subjects did not notice repetition of same word 35 times
2. subjects noticed own name mentioned in unattended ear
3. incompatible with cherry’s findings

Question 5

Describe the multistore model of memory

Answer 5

input>sensory register> short term memory>long-term memory

Question 6

What are three characteristics of bottleneck models of attention?

Answer 6

1. sensory register = large capacity, STM = limited capacity
2. assume transfer of info from sensory to short term
3. they differ in where and the nature of the bottleneck

Question 7

What are four assumptions of Broadbent’s filter model (bottle neck model)?

Answer 7

1. stimuli gain access in parallel to a sensory register
2. selection on the basis of physical/perception characteristics (spatial location, left/right ear)
3. selective filter prevents overloading of STM
4. inputs remaining in the buffer after filter undergoes semantic processing

Question 8

Does Broadbent’s filter model consistent with Cherry’s finding, why? 3 reasons

Answer 8

1. Physical characteristics of unattended info was remembered -
2. meaning info was not
3. unattended info undergo minimal processing before being filtered

Question 9

What are three assumptions of Treisman’s attenuation model?

Answer 9

1. instead of an all-or-none filter, an attenuator turns down the processing of unattended info
2. thresholds of all content-appropriate stimuli are lower
3. partially processed stimuli sometimes exceed threshold of conscious awareness, leading to breakthroughs

Question 10

What is the evaluation of Treisman’s attenuation model in regards to the cocktail party phenomenon?

Answer 10

Own name is processed in unattended channel because it has low threshold due to high salience (importance)

Question 11

What are three assumptions made by Deutsch and Deutsch’s late selection model?

Answer 11

1. information is analysed fully without attention
2. argued that attenuator is redundant, only ideas of different thresholds
3. bottleneck is late: at response e.g. cannot shadow two messages

Question 12

What did Treisman and Riley’s (1969) experiment entail?

Answer 12

Subjects presented with two messages to two ears - shadowed one message + tapping response to a word in either message

Question 13

What were the results of Triesman and Riley’s experiment?

Answer 13

Target detection 87% in shadowed message, 8% in non-shadowed > supported attenuation model

Question 14

Describe two characteristics of Johnston and Heinz’ flexible bottleneck view

Answer 14

1. the more stages of processing the greater the demands on capacity
2. selection occurs early in processing to minimize demands on capacity

Question 15

What are the characteristics of ‘practice’ in attention?

Answer 15

with practice we can perform other tasks simultaneously - performance is said to become more automatic

Question 16

What are five characteristics of ‘automaticity’ in attention?

Answer 16

1. fast
2. require less attentional capacity
3. unavailable to consciousness
4. unavoidable
5. inflexible

Question 17

What did Schiffrin & Schneider’s experiment characterize?

Answer 17

Target detection task - memorise targets (memory set), Ss are shown display containing targets (display set) - decide as quickly as possible is the display contained a target from the memory set.

Question 18

What is consistent mapping?

Answer 18

Targets and distractors do not overlap from trial to trial e.g. memory set: numbers only, distractors: letter only

Question 19

What is varied mapping?

Answer 19

Target on one trial may be a distractor in the next trial e.g. memory set: numbers, distractors: letters and numbers

Question 20

What were Shiffrin & Schneider’s results?

Answer 20

Consistent mapping- RT does not increase with set size = parallel search
Varied mapping - RT increases with set size = serial search

Question 21

What is the stroop interference effect?

Answer 21

the unavoidable aspect of word reading. Word reading is well practiced and automatic > unavoidable

Question 22

How does automaticity develop?

Answer 22

Associated with gradual reduction in the use of attentional resources

Question 23

What’s the theory explaining how automaticity develops? Explain

Answer 23

Logan’s instance theory - retrieving the already come to solution from memory (memory retrieval)

Question 24

What did Lassaline and Logan (1993) find?

Answer 24

Provided evidence for the instance theory by showing that a change in some attribute of the display (e.g. configuration) increased the set size effect

Question 25

According to the Instance theory, why are automatic processes fast?

Answer 25

because they require only the retrieval of solutions from memory