Lecture 6 Flashcards
What is attention?
The concentration and focus of mental effort
- Selecting what is relevant from sensory input and processing it for appropriate action
What captures our attention?
By seeing something that is sudden, intense, or unexpected. (Seeing a car crash into a house)
What is selective attention?
When people try and pay specific attention to something. (You look for someone in a crowd with a red hat makes you notice more red items in the room.
Experiment- Stroop test participants read a word that is a color but ignore the colour of the word
What is divided attention?
When someone has their attention on two or more tasks.
- Cooking dinner and watching TV
What are two things people need to do in directing attention?
Sustaining and shifting
What is endogenous control?
Endogenous control is goal-directed and is a top-down process.
E.g. Tuning out of a dull conversation at a party and tuning into another
What is exogenous control?
Exogenous control is stimulus-driven and is a bottom-up process.
E.g. When your attention is captured by hearing your best friend’s name in a conversation
What limits do we have on attention?
- We have limitations on what can be processed at one time
- We can usually make only one decision about an action at one time
- We cannot decide on what response to make for one task without causing a delay in this response selection for the other task
What is inattentional blindness?
When people focus their attention, they often miss other elements of a scene in plain sight
What is change blindness?
Changes in a scene are missed because they occur alongside a brief visual disruption
What are metaphors for attentional limitations?
Structure- We can store so much information like a box
Process- Capacity, resources, types of task demand
What was thought in the early selection research?
- Can’t detect that an unattended message with English-sounding vowels and consonants is in another language
- Can’t report meaning of unattended message
What was thought in late selection research?
-The unattended material is processed all the way to meaningful access before being discarded
What happens in a conjunction search?
When looking for the target there are also distractors that make it harder to find the target.
- Conjunction search is slower and affected by search set size
What is feature integration theory?
‘Automatic’ processing of stimulus into elementary features
Attention required to bind features into an object
(Using maps)
What are the two kinds of visual search?
Preattentive and attentive
What happens in preattentive visual searches?
- Features
- Parallel (efficient)
- Pop-out
- Flat slope
What happens in attentive visual search?
- Conjunctions
- Serial (inefficient)
- Non pop-out
- Steep slope
What are the limitations of feature integration theory (FIT)
- Features don’t always pop-out
- Conjunctions can lead to flat search slopes
How is the attentional blink observed?
- RSVP paradigm (Rapid serial visual presentation)
- Which is a stream of around 12 items presented rapidly. Participants report items at the end of each stream
What is the attentional blink?
- Participants report target 1 and target 2 and they need to ignore distractors
- We are interested in how identifying T1 (if it is right) affects the ability to identify T2
- Typically there is a lag-dependent deficit in T2 accuracy
This is the AB
What does lag dependent mean when looking at the attentional blink?
- T2 recall accuracy decreases as the number of distractors between T1 and T2 is reduced
- Accuracy recovers around lag 8 (which would be the 8th item after T1)
- T2 accuracy is unaffected at lag 1
What causes the AB?
Capacity: Brain is full
Attentional control is lost
