Lecture 3: Automaticity and Preattentive Processes Flashcards
What are the features and assumptions of automatic processes? Explain criticisms.
● Assumptions of features include:
○ Fast and effortless
○ Done in parallel (can be done simultaneously with another task)
○ Unavailable to conscious control (it’s done without thinking about it)
○ Unavoidable stroop effect
● The ‘popout’ effect is evidence for preattentive processes.
● Note: preattentive processes are innate, automatic processes are learned.
Explain some errors associated with automatic processes?
● Capture errors: it’s hard to deviate from a routine e.g. on the way home, told to bring
milk on the way, but your forget because it involves breaking routine.
● Omissions: when routine is interrupted and a step you usually take is missed e.g.
always putting wallet and keys somewhere, but you get distracted and put them
somewhere else (may lose them).
● Preservation: repeating a routine action because you may have forgotten you did it
(because it was automatic, therefore not memory trace) e.g. brushing teeth.
● Descriptions: correct action, with the wrong object e.g. phone rings, but you pick up
the iron instead, or throw out the gum and eat the wrapper.
● Associativeactivation errors: expectations cause loss of routine e.g. door rings and
you pick up the phone (wrong action and wrong object).
● Data driven response: dictated by outside force
● Loss of activation errors: e.g. going to a room and forgetting why you’re there.
Explain the findings of Shiffrin and Schneider.
● They conducted a study on detection of targets, with two kinds of frames: one with 2
frame sizes, one with 4 frame sizes. The target differed across the experiment. They warned subjects about the target (or several targets) and as each frame popped up, subjects put targets into working memory and click when they saw target reaction time was measured.
● 2 kinds of mapping occurred:
○ Consistent mapping: over trials the target is always the target and never a
distractor.
○ Varied mapping: target can be a target on some trials and distractor on
others.
● They concluded that the processes became automatised for consistent mapping, but
not for varied mapping. Consistent mapping of the target stimuli leads to flat(ish) search slopes similar to those of visual search curves. Search time becomes constant over time (but not perfectly constant). This is because highly learned things become automatic. Reverse mappings (changing the type of target) results in a huge performance cost, thus takes a lot longer to find the target.
● Criticism:
○ Always used letters and numbers are targets/distractors which may have
other effects due to their nature.
○ The slopes are never perfectly flat, so what accounts for variation in an
automatic process.
○ Theory doesn’t explain how the process occurs.
○ New theories have been developed in light of these critiques.
Restructuring automatic processes.
● Cheng (1985) stated that processes get restructured and is not automatised. The
skills you gain are not ‘automatic’ but how to complete the task most efficiently. e.g. chess champions do not win their matches like computers, they play from previous experience based on how to effectively achieve victory.
● This was further developed by Logan.
What is Logan’s Instance Theory? What are the control hierarchies?
● Logan (1988) state that automaticity is memory retrieval. But when a child adds, they
use their fingers, not memory however adults use memory. Apparently, experts have more information stored and organised in memory, one cue can trigger more elaborate memory and other cues can all create a chuck of complex memory.
● Novices are limited by a lack of knowledge, not resources.
● Complex behaviours to attentional stimulus, that may seem automatic, are nothing
more than a series of simple actions which are linked in an automatic fashion without having to think about which follows next. Links are not consciously made, rather they develop like LTP (the more action B follows action A, the more likely it will be to automatically occur next time without thinking).
● Every time you do a task, you lay down a memory trace and the more memory traces you leave down, the faster the retrieval.
● Criticisms however include:
○ This theory does not predict elimination of capacity demands and loss of voluntary control. It only focuses on faster behaviour.
● Logan explains that you become so automatised that you cannot verbalise your thinking processes in your memory this explains lack of awareness. But Logan’s theory predicted that our behaviour isn’t automatic, but rather a sequence of complex behaviours.. so not necessarily unconscious to the person. The person is able to control their actions. Like in the stroop effect we tend to automatically say the colour the word is in but we can control that.
● Logan believes we have an ‘outer loop’ of process’, which are conscious (like choosing how to phrase a sentence, select words, etc) which informs an ‘inner loop’ of subconscious behaviour, that results in outward (motor, verbal etc) behaviour (such as finger movements, touch typing, verbalising).
● He notes that when people made mistakes, but it didn’t appear on screen, their typing slowed down, but when the screen showed mistakes, that they didn’t actually make, their typing didn’t slow down. This seems to indicate that their inner loop knew whether they had made mistakes or not.
● He also noted that typing is greatly slowed down if you try to only type the right hand characters. This is because you need to focus your conscious attention on what was previously inner loop tasks, but it is very hard for the outer loop to do what the inner loop normally does, as the outer loop doesn’t really know what exactly the inner loop was doing.
