Lecture 2 - Attention

Question 1

Selective attention - why does this occur?

Answer 1

• world is full of info eg auditory, visual etc.
• some info more important
• if we actively focus our attention on this information, it becomes more salient
• “attention as a filter”

Question 2

What is the cocktail party effect?

Answer 2

• eg you’re in a crowded noisy place with multiple conversations going on
• yet you’re still able to attend to a given conversation and block out others.

Question 3

The cocktail party effect - how does this occur?? How much info are we aware of from the conversations that we are not actively attending to??

Answer 3

Cherry investigated these questions using the “Dichotic listening task”

Question 4

How does the Dichotic listening task work?

Answer 4

• different messages are played in each ear
• participants have to attend to one message and ignore the other.
• they ‘shadow’ the attended message by repeating what they hear out loud.
• generally an easy task.

Question 5

Findings of the Dichotic listening task

Answer 5

• participants doing the task had no memory of the info in the unattended channel.
• participants were even unaware of language changes in the unattended channel.
• aware of gender changes of message (but this was more an awareness of a pitch shift)
• participants were unaware of a word presented 35 times to the unattended channel!

Question 6

The early selection model of attention (Broadbent)

Answer 6

1. Info enters the sensory memory store.
2. Then filtered based upon its physical characteristics (left/right channel, pitch etc.)
3. Semantic meaning or content of the message extracted AFTER the filtering process has occurred (in the STM)
   No meaning extracted from unattended message

Question 7

Problems with Broadbent’s Early selection model

Answer 7

-Moray demonstrated that when the listener’s name was presented in the unattended ear about 30% of participants noticed it,
-Gray and Wedderburn presented participants with:
“Dear - 7 - Jane” in one ear and…
“9 - Aunt - 5” in the other
Although they were told to only attend to one ear, participants perceived the attended message as “Dear aunt Jane”
-findings suggest that some semantic info from unnattended message was being processed.

Question 8

Attenuators Model of Attention - Treisman

Answer 8

• rather than passing through an all or none filter, the messages passes thorough an attenuator which ‘turns up the volume’ on one message and ‘turns down the volume’ on the other(s).
• even after this attenuation, certain info in the unattended channel is deemed important enough to be processed.
• meaning then extracted in STM

Question 9

Evidence for the late selection model

Answer 9

• semantic content of an unattended message can influence the interpretation of the ATTENDED message.
• participants heard “they threw stones at the bank” in attended channel
• heard words such as “river” or “money” in unattended channel. Shown a set of sentences and are asked which one most closely resembles the shadowed message.
• results suggest that the semantic meaning of words is processed PRIOR to filtering. This led to the idea of the late selection model.

Question 10

General consensus about unattended information

Answer 10

Whether or not unattended info ‘leaks’ through’ is context dependant.

Question 11

The Stroop Task

Answer 11

• an example of unattended info leaking through
• required to focus on the colour of the word, not the word itself.
• the semantic info in the word (the colour name) interferes with our ability to say the name of the colour.

Question 12

Divided attention: what factors affect our ability to divide our attention between multiple tasks?

Answer 12

• task difficulty: easier to perform two simple tasks at the same time, than two difficult tasks.
• practice: with practice we can get better at dividing our attention between tasks.
• task similarity: the more similar two tasks are, the more difficult it is to perform then simultaneously.

Question 13

Why is driving a car and talking on a mobile simultaneously illegal? These tasks aren’t similar at all!

Answer 13

• it appears that attention is a LIMITED RESOURCE
• even with lots of practice, performance on a single task is generally better than dual task performance,
• small mistake driving could result in a fatal consequence

Question 14

Sustained attention

Answer 14

• difficult to do, even if the task is easy
• increased likelihood to make false alarms
• the longer you are required to sustain your attention, the greater the likelihood of making an error.