Lecture 6

Question 1

Why need attention

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

Capturing attention

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Selective attention

Answer 3

asking participants to respond to relevant stimulus and ignore irrelevant stimulus. e.g. the Stroop test

Question 4

divided attention

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Sustaining vs Shifting attention

Answer 5

sustain = be able to maintain focus on a task
shifting = flexibility to be able to shift attention when required

Question 6

endogenous vs exogenous shifting

Answer 6

endogenous = goal directed (voluntary shift) (top down)
exogenous = stimulus driven (involuntary shift) (bottom up)

Question 7

What is attention

Answer 7

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

Question 8

inattentional blindness

Answer 8

when people focus attention and miss other elements by accident (gorrila and playing ball example).

Question 9

change blindness

Answer 9

change in scene missed because they are alongside a visual disruption (e.g. blink/occlusions)

Question 10

objects and locations

Answer 10

attention can operate at specifically level of objects and not necessarily their field of attentional view

Question 11

Balints syndrome

Answer 11

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

Question 12

metaphors for attentional limitations

Answer 12

structure:
- bottleneck attention
- gates
- stores
Process:
- capacity, resources, types of task

Question 13

Hemholtz

Answer 13

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)

Question 14

covert vs overt attention

Answer 14

covert = move attention without actively attending there
overt = voluntarily moving of attention

Question 15

cocktail party effect

Answer 15

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

Question 16

Cherry and dichotic listening

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Broadbent filter theory

Answer 17

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

Question 18

Mackay

Answer 18

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)

Question 19

Deustch and Deutsch

Answer 19

developed the idea of late selection. Unattended material is processed all the way to meaning access before discarded. early vs late selection

Question 20

perceptual load and Lavie experiment

Answer 20

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

Question 21

Lavie and working memory load

Answer 21

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

Question 22

processing capacity (kahneman)

Answer 22

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

Question 23

Feature search (parallel)

Answer 23

disjunctive: process the info all at once

Question 24

conjunction search (serial)

Answer 24

distractors go up and have to overtly move attention to determine a target

Question 25

Feature integration theory

Answer 25

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

Question 26

limitations of feature integration theory (humphrey and duncan)

Answer 26

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

Question 27

guided search

Answer 27

pre attention features can guide attention where as FIT separates pre attention and attention. not just conjunctive and disjunctive search there are in betweens

Question 28

RSVP limitation

Answer 28

rapid serial visual presentation