Lecture 4 - Attention

Question 1

What is attention?

Answer 1

Ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in our environment.

Question 2

What is selective attention?

Answer 2

attending to one thing while ignoring others

Question 3

What is divided attention?

Answer 3

paying attention to more than one thing at a time

Question 4

What is the dichotic listening task?

Answer 4

One message is presented to the left ear and another to the right ear (shadowing / dichotic listening).

Participant “shadows” one message to ensure he is attending to that message (selective listening + repeating attended message).

Participants cannot report the content of the message in unattended ear BUT:
Knew that there was a message
Knew the gender of the speaker.

Hence, the unattended ear is being processed at some level:
Cocktail party effect
Change in voice is noticed.
Change to a tone is noticed.

Question 5

Describe Broadbent’s filter model

Answer 5

Early selection model:
Filters message before incoming information is analysed for meaning

1. sensory memory - holds and transfers info
2. filter - identifies message and passes on
3. detector - processes info
4. STM - receives output, transfers to LTM

Question 6

What are the limitations of broadbents model?

Answer 6

Cannot explain:

• Cocktail party phenomenon: Ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli, especially at a party where there are a lot of simultaneous conversations.
• Why participants can shadow meaningful messages that switch from one ear to another

Question 7

Describe Treisman’s Attenuation Model

Answer 7

Intermediate selection model:
Attended messages can be separated from unattended messages early in the information-processing system.
Selection can also occur later.

Introduction of the Attenuator to replace Broadbent’s filter.
analyzes incoming message in terms of physical characteristics, language, and meaning.
Attended message is let through the attenuator at full strength.
Unattended message is let through at much weaker strength.

Question 8

What is treismans directionary unit?

Answer 8

Contains words, each of which has a threshold for being activated.
Words that are common or important have low thresholds.
Uncommon words have high thresholds.

Question 9

What are the late selection models?

Answer 9

Selection does not occur until after meaning has been analyzed.

MacKay (1973)
In attended ear, participants heard ambiguous sentences. (e.g.: “They were throwing stones at the bank.”). In unattended ear, participants heard either “river” or “money.”
Participants chose which was closest to the meaning of attended message:
“They threw stones toward the side of the river yesterday.”
“They threw stones at the savings and loan association yesterday.”
Meaning of the biasing word affected participants’ choice while participants were unaware of the presentation of the biasing words.

Question 10

What is the load theory of attention?

Answer 10

the extent to which unattended visual information is perceived depends on the perceptual load of the attended task

Question 11

What is the processing capacity?

Answer 11

how much information a person can handle at any given moment.

Question 12

What is the perceptual load?

Answer 12

the difficulty of a given task
- Low-load (easy) tasks - take up less processing capacity. Task may leave resources available for processing unattended task-irrelevant stimuli
- High-load (difficult) tasks - take up more processing capacity, meaning use all cognitive resources & don’t leave any resources to process unattended task irrelevant stimuli.

Question 13

Give an example of the load theory of attention

Answer 13

You can listen to loud music or audiobooks while driving your car on the motorway

You have to pause or turn down the volume while parking your car in a difficult spot

Question 14

What is the stroop effect?

Answer 14

Name of the word interferes with the ability to name the ink color.
Cannot avoid paying attention to the meanings of the words.

Question 15

What are training effects?

Answer 15

The more often you do a type of task, the
Better you get at it
More automatized the task becomes.
The more automatized a task is, the less processing capacity it takes up (reduced cognitive load because less executive function is used).

Question 16

What is overt attention? How do you measure?

Answer 16

Overt attention is observable attention and can be observed in eye movements.
Saccades: rapid movements of the eyes from one place to another.
Fixations: short pauses on points of interest.
Studied by using an eye tracker.

Question 17

What is stimulus salience?

Answer 17

Areas and objects that stand out and capture attention
- Bottom-up process.
- Depends on characteristics of the stimulus.
- Color and motion are highly salient.

Question 18

What is scene schema?

Answer 18

Knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes
- Top-down process
- Help guide fixations from one area of a scene to another.

Eyes movements are determined by task
- Eyes movements precede motor actions by a fraction of a second.

Question 19

What is covert attention?

Answer 19

Attention Without Eye Movements

Question 20

What is the cueing procedure?

Answer 20

Procedure for testing memory in which a participant is presented with cues, such as words or phrases, to aid recall of previously experienced stimuli.

Question 21

Describe Schneider and Shiffrins study of divided attention

Answer 21

There is one target stimulus in the memory set (the 3) and four stimuli in each frame.
Memory set: one to four characters called target stimuli.
Test frames: could contain random dot patterns, a target, distractors.
Ask if target from memory set was present in a frame?
Improvement in performance with practice in Schneider and Schiffrin’s (1977) experiment.

Arrow indicates the point at which participants reported that the task had become automatic.

This is the result of experiments in which there were four target stimuli in the memory set and two stimuli in each test frame.

Question 22

What is inattentional blindness?

Answer 22

Stimuli that are not attended are not perceived, even though a person might be looking directly at it

Question 23

What is change blindness?

Answer 23

Difficulty in detecting changes in similar, but slightly different, scenes that are presented one after another.

The changes are often easy to see once attention is directed to them but are usually undetected in the absence of appropriate attention.

Question 24

What is binding?

Answer 24

Binding is the process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object.

Question 25

What is the binding problem?

Answer 25

The problem of explaining how an object’s individual features become bound together

Question 26

What is the feature integration theory?

Answer 26

Every object has multiple features that need to be integrated after feature detectors have processed them individually

The feature integration model has 2 stages
1. Preattentive stage
2. Focused attention stage

Question 27

What happens in the preattentive stage?

Answer 27

Object analyzed into features
Automatic - No effort or attention, unaware of process

Question 28

What happens in the focused attention stage?

Answer 28

Attention plays key role
Features are combined into perceptual object

Question 29

What is illusory conjunction?

Answer 29

a situation in which features from different objects are inappropriately combined

Question 30

What is the illusionary conjunction experiment?

Answer 30

Stimuli such as shapes and numbers
Participants report combination of features from different stimuli.
Illusory conjunctions occur because features are “free floating.”, combined the second stage of FIT called the Focus attention stage.

Question 31

What is Balints syndrome?

Answer 31

Where patients fail to apprehend all but one of simultaneously presented objects at the same location.

Condition is object based not location based.

Inability to focus attention on individual objects

High number of illusory conjunctions reported.

Question 32

What type of processing is used in the feature integration theory?

Answer 32

Mostly bottom-up processing.

Top-down processing influences processing when participants are told what they would see.

Top-down processing combines with feature analysis to help one perceive things accurately.

Question 33

What are the neural correlates of attention?

Answer 33

Attention network - more active during tasks (task positive) engaged attention

Default mode network - more active at rest (task negative) mind wandering