Lecture 3 Attention 1

Question 1

What information does Neisser’s experiment provide us?

Answer 1

That the brain does not encode or pay attention to everything it is exposed to. In fact it was found that the brain typically concentrates on a small piece of what is going on around it and ignores the rest, which is know as inattentional blindness.
In his experiment, neisser has the subjects focusing on the number of passes that the players with black shirts pass, as the participants count, a lady with an umbrella passes by unnoticed.

Question 2

What is Dichotic listening?

Answer 2

A test commonly used to investigate selective attention within the auditory system. Two messages are send to different ears(attended and unattended channel), and they must attend to one and repeat back what it says (shadowing)

Question 3

In the Dichotic tests, what are the conclusions?

Answer 3

mainly that selective listening is easy
the ignored message is still slightly noticed in that the sound is presented, gender of speaker, and speech changed to tones. What was failed to be noticed in the ignored message was that English changed to German. it English speech was presented backwards, and the same word list was repeated 35 times.

Question 4

How does the simulation of a cocktail party relate to selective listening?

Answer 4

In a cocktail party, we might be receiving multiple “channels” of input, but some are attended and other ignored depending what we are interested in joining.

Question 5

What happens in the selective seeing experiment?

Answer 5

Subjects are given 4 trails , 3 trails are normal, and on the fourth trail, something else appears (color, form. words, or motion) typically 25-75 % failed to notice the change.

Question 6

What does the selective seeing experiment inform us?

Answer 6

There is no (conscious) perception without attention.

Question 7

What was previously accepted wisdom about attention and perception?

Answer 7

Paying attention is Matter of sight and blindness

Question 8

What are examples of real world inattentional blindness?

Answer 8

Flight simulator where they projected flight console info in the cockpit windshield and heads-up display on windshields
where a second visual in our line of vision can intrude in our safety while using these objects.

Question 9

What is Own-Name effect?

Answer 9

Subjects name is sometimes noticed though unattended
They are directed to attend to message A, ignore message B.
B says you may stop now and only 6% stopped
B says “your name” stop now and 33 % noticed
Effect is not strong, if subjects were looking for new instructions, 80% noticed “stop now”

Question 10

T or F, does attention gate(open,direct) conscious memory?

Answer 10

True

Question 11

What is the connection between attention and brain activity?

Answer 11

Attention modulates brain activity, in different blocks, attends differently to different things, exp: faces higher than housed or color of cross

Question 12

Are we truly blind or deaf to unattended information?

Answer 12

sometimes ignored information is noticed, at least sometimes. E.g., own name visual or auditory
inattention does not shut down processing of ignored stimuli –> they are sometimes noticed; when unnoticed, they can indirectly change behavior (e.g., GSR response, visual illusion)

Question 13

What is the connection between attention and memory:

Answer 13

attention gates conscious memory; modulates what is later recognized

exp: Gutman (1981) asks participants to pay attention to the red shape details, later give them a memory test. They are able to sort attended shapes from new ones and cant distinguish unattended shapes from new ones.

Question 14

What information does the conditioned GSR (galvanic skin response inform us?

Answer 14

Evidence that ignored information may also receive semantic processing

experiment: Corten & Wood (1972):
- at test: attend to message from one ear, ignore the other [list of words, shock on city names]
- measured galvanic skin response (GSR) when ignored ear contains: unrelated nouns (10% GSR), the shock-associated cities (38% GSR), other cities (23% GSR)

Question 15

What information does priming from ignored words inform us?

Answer 15

Evidence that ignored information may also receive semantic processing

MacKay (1973):

• attended ear: “They threw stones at the bank yesterday.”
• ignored ear: (at the same time as “bank”) “money” or “river”
• recall of the sentence (meaning of “bank”) is biased by unattended word

Question 16

early vs. late selection models

Answer 16

early selection model:

• evidence for: attention modulates explicit perception, memory, and brain activity
• evidence against: unattended stimuli can produce indirect effect on behavior

late selection model:

• evidence for: unattended stimuli can produce indirect effect on behavior
• evidence against: not always, not fully

each has its merit: it is possible to filter out unattended stimuli early (i.e., before full semantic processing); but semantic processing of unattended stimuli sometimes occurs

when do we filter unattended stimuli early, and when are they processed more fully? –> it depends!

Question 17

perceptual load theory

Answer 17

The easier the primary task is on the attended stimuli, the more likely is there remaining attentional resource, leading to fuller processing of ignored stimuli; Increasing the difficulty of the primary task on attended stimuli will reduce the processing of ignored stimuli, leading to early filtering; increasing the demand of the attended task may eliminate this effect

experimental evidence: presented with a circle with dot motion and word

• task: people attend to word, ignore dot motion
• easy primary task: is the word upper or lower case?
• hard primary task: does the word contain 2 syllables or not?
• dependent measure: brain activation to the ignored stimuli - dot motion
• predictions:
  1. If dot motion is always filtered out early, brain activation to dot motion should be low
  2. If dot motion is always perceived even though people are not attending to it, brain activation to dot motion should be high
  3. If dot motion is filtered out when the word task is hard but not when it’s easy, then brain activation to dot motion should be high in the easy word task, but low in the hard word task

Question 18

Increasing the demand of the attended task may 
eliminate this effect?
a) Late selection 
b) early selection 
c) Perceptual load theory

Answer 18

Perceptual load theory

Question 19

When people focus on certain stimuli and ignore others, they generally notice only relatively gross physical properties of the ignored stimuli?

a) Late selection
b) early selection
c) Perceptual load theory

Answer 19

early selection

Question 20

It is often possible to show that some semantic processing of ignored stimuli still occurs?

a) Late selection
b) early selection
c) Perceptual load theory

Answer 20

late selection

Question 21

Brain structures? identify them

Answer 21

Right and left hemisphere
Glove shaped
Frontal lobe- contains the olfactory bulb, near where the nose is.
parietal lobe-
temporal lobe-contains the auditory cortex, near where the ears are. also the inferior temporal cortex (the face sensitive fusiform gyrus is located) and middle temporal cortex (motion-sensitive MT area is located)
occipital lobe- contains the visual cortex, far away from the eyes