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PSY270 > Lecture 3: Attention > Flashcards

Lecture 3: Attention Flashcards

1
Q

What is attention?

A
  • process of concentrating mental effort on sensory or mental events
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2
Q

What are the different types of attention?

A

Exogenous-Endogenous
Overt-Covert
Automatic-Controlled

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3
Q

What is the difference between exogenous and endogenous attention?

A

exogenous:

  • attention under control of a stimulus
  • reflexive and automatic
  • is caused by a sudden change in the periphery

endogenous:

  • intentional allocation of attentional resources to a predetermined location or space
  • attention is oriented according to an observer’s goals or desires
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4
Q

What is the difference between overt and covert attention?

A

overt:
- moving eyes to selectively attend to an item/location

covert:
- mental shift of focus without moving eyes

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5
Q

What is change blindness?

A
  • failure to notice change in stimulus during a saccade
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6
Q

What is inattentional blindness?

A
  • failure to notice something unexpected or unimportant in the environment
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7
Q

What did Smith & Merikle discover about attention?

A
  • attention can occur without awareness
  • asked to complete a word stem PUP with one set of participants having “PUPPY” briefly flash on the screen and told not to use it
  • group with “PUPPY” much less likely to complete word stem with that word
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8
Q

What are the three kinds of input attention?

A
  • Alertness or arousal
  • Orienting reflex or response
  • Spotlight attention and search
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9
Q

What are the three kinds of controlled attention?

A
  • Selective attention
  • Mental resources and conscious processing
  • Supervisory attentional system
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10
Q

What is input attention?

A
  • concerned with highlighting sensory information to be encoded by our cognitive system
  • typically fast, automatic and occurs outside of awareness
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11
Q

What is alertness?

A
  • state of being awake and responsive to the environment
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12
Q

What is the Yerkes-Dodson law?

A
  • performance is related to arousal
  • performance is poor with high or low arousal
  • optimal performance for difficult tasks requires lower arousal than easy tasks
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13
Q

How do people maintain alertness over an extended period of time?

A
  • requires sustained attention (vigilance)
  • sustained attention is only possible for ~30 minutes
  • over time there is a shift to a more conservative response bias
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14
Q

What is signal detection theory?

A
  • recognizes that perception does not occur in a vaccuum
  • d’ (sensitivity) is the measure of discriminability i.e. can the signal be detected
    > difference between “noise only” and “signal + noise”
  • β (criterion) is the measure for response bias
    > Liberal responder will have a low β, conservative responder will have a high β
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15
Q

What is the orienting reflex?

A
  • the reflexive redirections of attention toward a salient stimulus
  • most salient items are those whose visual attributes differ substantially from surrounding items
  • designed to monitor changes in the environment
    > changes must be unexpected
    > repeated exposure leads to habituation
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16
Q

What are the four key visual attributes for increasing saliency?

A
  • colour
  • size
  • motion
  • orientation
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17
Q

What is spotlight attention?

A
  • analogous to the orienting reflex, but it is endogenous and can be covert
  • focuses on a location to prepare a stimulus for encoding
  • largely driven by expectations
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18
Q

What was Posner’s experiment with attention?

A

Subjects sat in front of a screen and asked to focus on a central point. Must press a button once they detect stimulus flash up on either side of the focus.

  1. valid trial - arrow indicates stimulus
  2. neutral trial - no arrow
  3. invalid trial - arrow points to wrong side of attention cross
19
Q

What is controlled attention?

A
  • deliberate, voluntary allocation of mental effort to a stimulus or mental event
  • typically slow, cannot occur automatically and is available to consciousness
20
Q

What questions does dual-task procedure attempt to answer?

A

“How can we process some information while ignoring other stimuli?”

“Can attention be divided between multiple tasks?”

21
Q

What is Cherry’s dichotic listening task?

A
  • people listen to two different stories in each ear and have to repeat one
  • sometimes must “shadow” i.e. repeat the story they’re listening to
22
Q

What was demonstrated in the dichotic listening research?

A
  • people are good at paying attention to a message in one ear only – i.e. people are good at selectively attending
  • shadowing during a dichotic listening task requires most (all) of a person’s attention capacity
  • people notice sensory information in unattended ear
  • people do not notice the meaning of the message in the unattended ear
23
Q

What is the bottleneck theory of attention?

A
  • proposes that attention acts as ‘filter’ that only lets some information through at a time
  • only information that passes through the filter can be processed
24
Q

What does Broadbent’s early selection theory propose about attention?

A
  • attention selects information based on physical characteristics
  • stimuli enters input channels that pass through a selective filter and enters into a limited-capacity decision channel
  • can give response and enter into long-term memory store
25
Q

What is the problem with early selection theory?

A
  • People are aware of their own name in an unattended message
  • Triesman’s experiment showed that in a dichotic listening task, people will follow a narrative in the other ear before switching back to the one they’re supposed to be paying attention to
26
Q

What does Triesman’s late selection theory propose about attention?

A
  • attention tunes the strength of incoming information
  • messages pass through an attenuator that weighs how much attention should be paid to each signal,
    then passes to the dictionary unit to consolidate them and then moves on to memory
  • the attended signal is stronger than other stimuli after passing through the filter, but…
    > Unattended stimuli may be more intense
    > Unattended stimuli may be ‘more important’
    > Unattended stimuli may be ‘more likely’
27
Q

Compare and contrast automatic/implicit and controlled/explicit attentional processes.

A

AUTOMATIC:

  • doesn’t occur with intention
  • doesn’t use attention resources
  • fast
  • parallel

CONTROLLED:

  • under conscious control
  • requires attention
  • slow
  • serial
28
Q

Discuss attention as a mental resource.

A
  • fixed amount of attentional resources that we can use to perform mental work
    > more cognitive load = more attentional resources used
  • have some control over how we allot these resources
  • explains how we can complete multiple tasks at the same time
  • with practice tasks require fewer attentional resources – they become automatic
29
Q

Describe Shiffrin & Schneider’s attention study.

A
  • Memory set (target): letters or numbers
  • Frame size: 1, 2 or 4
  • Target presence: present or absent
  • Distractor items: same category (varied mapping) or different category (consistent mapping)
30
Q

What were the results of the different category in Shiffrin & Schneider’s study?

A

Different category (consistent mapping):

  • After ~900 trials participants could complete task without attention (automatic)
  • Required only 80 ms per frame to achieve 95% accuracy
  • Number of items per frame didn’t affect response time
31
Q

What were the results of the same category in Shiffrin & Schneider’s study?

A

Same category (varied mapping):

  • Always required attention to complete with accuracy
  • Same category condition required 400 ms to achieve 95% accuracy
  • Number of items per frame did affect same category searches; slowed down dramatically as number of items per frame increased
32
Q

What are the disadvantages of automaticity?

A
  • Action slips
  • Performance plateau
  • Mind wandering
33
Q

What is visual search?

A
  • occurs when we actively scan for an item

- involves using attention to focus on object features in a particular location

34
Q

Compare and contrast feature search and conjunction search.

A

FEATURE:

  • scan for just one feature
  • i.e. searching for a green circle among blue squares: look for green item OR circular item
  • parallel process

CONJUNCTION:

  • searching for several features together
  • i.e. searching for a green circle among blue circles and green squares
  • serial process
35
Q

What are the three independent variables in a visual search task in lab?

A

IV-type of search
IV-number of distractors
IV-presence of target

36
Q

Describe feature integration theory.

A
  1. Single feature does not require attention and “pops out” automatically – this is the preattentive stage
  2. Binding features requires attention – this is the focused attention stage
37
Q

What do we pay attention to?

A
  • items that are: salient, important, or expected
38
Q

What types of testings can be done on subject samples?

A

T-Test: 2 groups
> independent: between subjects
> paired: within subjects

ANOVA: >2 groups

39
Q

What is vigilance/sustained attention?

A
  • maintenance of attention for infrequent events over long periods of time
40
Q

What is attention capture?

A
  • spontaneous redirection of attention to stimuli in the world based on physical characteristics
41
Q

What is habituation?

A
  • gradual reduction of the orienting response back to baseline
42
Q

What is inhibition of return?

A
  • in a visual search task, it describes how recently checked locations are mentally marked by attention as places that the search would not return to
43
Q

What is the dual-task procedure?

A
  • two tasks are presented such that one task captures attention as completely as possible
44
Q

What is an attentional blink?

A
  • a brief slow-down in processing due to having processed another very recent event
  • also called psychological refractory period

PSY270 (10 decks)

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