Lecture 6 Flashcards
Why need attention
Because we suffer the effects of attentional limitations and cannot properly perform two tasks concurrently. We can only make one decision about an action at a time.
Capturing attention
Certain events suddenly move attention (e.g. lightning strike). Has to be sudden onset, intense and unexpected. Debate about top-down and bottom-up features and expectations
Selective attention
asking participants to respond to relevant stimulus and ignore irrelevant stimulus. e.g. the Stroop test
divided attention
participants dividing attention over multiple concurrent tasks (multi-tasking). Can manipulate the priority of task and temporal overlap of various components in the task. Participants will show attentional limitations
Sustaining vs Shifting attention
sustain = be able to maintain focus on a task
shifting = flexibility to be able to shift attention when required
endogenous vs exogenous shifting
endogenous = goal directed (voluntary shift) (top down)
exogenous = stimulus driven (involuntary shift) (bottom up)
What is attention
Concentration and focusing of mental effort. cognitive psych definition = selecting what is relevant from sensory input and processing it for appropriate action. refers to prioritising cognitive operations
inattentional blindness
when people focus attention and miss other elements by accident (gorrila and playing ball example).
change blindness
change in scene missed because they are alongside a visual disruption (e.g. blink/occlusions)
objects and locations
attention can operate at specifically level of objects and not necessarily their field of attentional view
Balints syndrome
patients can not perceive more than 1 stimulus at a time unless they are like connected together. if red and green are presented together will only be able to tell one colour, but if a line connects them can tell both
metaphors for attentional limitations
structure:
- bottleneck attention
- gates
- stores
Process:
- capacity, resources, types of task
Hemholtz
performed the first covert attentional experiment. Screen is full of letters larger than field of view. without moving his eyes, could still attend to particular locations (covert vs overt attention)
covert vs overt attention
covert = move attention without actively attending there
overt = voluntarily moving of attention
cocktail party effect
based on how much can you tell about info that is not attended. experiment was keeping track of one conversation and tuning out others but when heard name in another conversation, responded
Cherry and dichotic listening
Participants hear different message from each ear and asked to attend to one message and repeat as they hear it. people could pick up the physical features of the unattended message but not understand it
Broadbent filter theory
people do not process unattended stimuli beyond the analysis of basic physical properties. similar to bottleneck attentional theory and early selection. HOWEVER, if hear name in unattended message could be able to tell
Mackay
later evidence found, that sometimes meaning of the unattended message has an underlying effect. Used the unattending message to to bias meaning of attended message homonym (e.g. river bank / money bank)
Deustch and Deutsch
developed the idea of late selection. Unattended material is processed all the way to meaning access before discarded. early vs late selection
perceptual load and Lavie experiment
priming study where there were letters if it was the same letter/group of letters based on low/high load and just different capital / lowercase. in low load if the peripheral and central were compatible (same letter) best reaction time showing late selection beacause unattended stimulus biased the attended stimulus. but in high load showed early selection as less process of distractor. overall more distraction in low load. perceive distractor less in high load. in a high perceptual load there is less resources to be spilt onto distractors therefore less distractive processing
Lavie and working memory load
low load = remember 1 digit then do the letter perceptual load experiment, then asked if they remember the digit
high load = same but remember 6 digits. high load here uses more distractor processing, opposite to perceptual load. therefore loading working memory means less control of what you process. just think of opposites for working memory load and perceptual load
processing capacity (kahneman)
limitations on the processing rather than the structure. number of concurrent tasks that can be done depend on the difficulty of current task. pool/allocation of resources determined on motivation. led to ideas about automaticity and after training things use less resources
Feature search (parallel)
disjunctive: process the info all at once
conjunction search (serial)
distractors go up and have to overtly move attention to determine a target
Feature integration theory
during pre-attention all physical features are processed (low-level). if feature search, will only use pre attention. attention is required to bind features into an object or looking for a conjunction of features and combining feature maps
limitations of feature integration theory (humphrey and duncan)
two factors are neglected by FIT. similarity of distractors and targets can be confusing even though should be easy as they are two physically different structures. And heterogeneity of distractors = search is much easier when distractors are all very similar
guided search
pre attention features can guide attention where as FIT separates pre attention and attention. not just conjunctive and disjunctive search there are in betweens
RSVP limitation
rapid serial visual presentation
