LECTURE TEN

Question 1

ICONIC MEMORY

Answer 1

Visual. Lasts for less than a second.

Question 2

ECHOIC MEMORY

Answer 2

Auditory. Lasts for a couple seconds.

Question 3

SENSORY MEMORY

Answer 3

• “Unlimited” capacity
• Necessary for temporal integration
• Before entering working memory, information must be attended to

Question 4

ATTENTION

Answer 4

• “spotlight”
• Selective attention – perceptual
• Focusing; limiting information being processed
• Increasing neural gain for attended to item
• Allocation of cognitive resources
• Can divide attention if no/little overlap between
  resources (e.g., instrumental music while reading)
• Sustained behavior on one task over longer time
• Concentration, vigilance
• Sitting in a two-hour lecture
• External (attending to the world) and internal (attending to self/thought)

Question 5

ORIENTING ATTENTION

Answer 5

• Process of directing attention towards stimulus
• If you hear a loud noise, you’ll look (overt spatial
  orientation)
• Attention can also be dissociated from eye gaze
• Covert spatial orientation [Orient attention without orienting eyes, throwing a basketball pass]

Question 6

FOCUSING

Answer 6

• Look around – lots of possible things to attend to
• Can only focus on limited information
• Without focusing…
• Overstimulation
• Huxley’s theory of psychedelic

Question 7

CONCENTRATION

Answer 7

• Sustain behavior in the face of other (usually more
  engaging) options
• Difficulty concentrating
• We all have difficulty concentrating – situation and time dependent
• Daydreaming / mind wandering

Question 8

ATTENTION as a FILTER

Answer 8

• Not all information can be attended to at once
• Grand illusion of complete perception
• Attending to one thing comes at the expense of attending to other things
• “Attentional bottleneck”

Question 9

BROADBENT’S FILTER MODEL OF ATTENTION

Answer 9

• Stable world assumption
• Not everything needs to be attended to all the time
• Most things don’t change
• Assume that what isn’t being attended to isn’t changing
• Since attention is a limited resource, we ignore
  everything we aren’t attending to