Midterm Flashcards
When did the concept of attention appear?
- Philosophical era (16th and 18th century
- Malebranch on dividing attention
- Leibniz on apperception (consciously aware of what is around us)
Attention in the rise of experimental psychology?
- 1860-1909
- Helmholtz: direct attention without changing position of gaze (using peripheral vision)
- Structuralism: Wundt & Tichner = analysis of mental experience and how combine together during complex mental activity (attention is voluntary)
What is William James (1890) take on attention?
- Getting best representation of what were directing our attention too
- Possibility of multiple trains of thought
- Can pay attention to multiple things
What is James classification of attention?
- Attention is directed to objects of sense (taste, spatial, smell), and ideal/represented objects (symbols, mental representation)
- Attention is directed to immediate or past objects (memory)
- Attention can be passive/reflexive (loud noise diverts attention) or active/voluntary (I divert my own attention cosnciously)
What is the ideomotor theory of action?
- An action/motor response requires attention
- Mental addition and ball squeeze study (did not squeeze ball as hard when adding math) = attention is needed for action/motor control
What was the attention research in the 20th century?
- 1910-45: de-emphaisis on attentional mechanism except..
- Jersild: switching attention ( protocol on how well we can switch our attention from one thing to another)
- Stroop: interference (colored words - interference on mental representation)
- Cognitive revolution: WW2 military application and vigilance for paying attention to radar screens
What is dichotic listening?
- Paying attention to both ears to two signals coming in
What were the resource models for visual selective attention in 1970s?
- General/unitary resources Kahneman: general attention capacity and pool of attention resources that was limited
- Multiple resources: multiple attention capacities to do two things at same time without dropping our attention on both of them
What are visual search research in 1980s to present?
- Posner Attentional spotlight metaphor = visual attention is like spotlight, can see more clearly when attention is directed (wtv is outside is less clear)
- Treisman feature integration theory: how we perform visual search look for features
What are the selection for action in 1980s to present?
- Allport: no capacity limitation, other mechanism such as coordination that limits processing
What are the neuroscience approaches in 1980s to present?
- Neuroscience (ERP and FMRI, PET) allow to pinpoint neural circuits that are relevant for different tasks
What are the assumptions of one taxonomy of attention?
- We have limited capacity to process info
- Selection: narrow down options for info processing
- Modulation: manage to channel our processing capacity (modulate auditory environment)
- Vigilance: maintenance of attentional focus over time
What are the main takeaways from A taxonomy of attention from Chun et al.,?
- Internal attention: task rules, response, LTM, working memory
- External attention: features, objects, sensory modality’s, spatial location, time points
- Goal directed attention can influence both internal and external objects
- Stimulus driven attention only operates on external targets
What are the different functions of selective attention?
- Perception: restrict features that you are looking for to not over load system bc have many streams (binding problem)
- Awareness: prepare cognitive system for further processing (pre-perception), priming to detect target = efficient to perceive
- Action: Perform certain response to stimulus, effector system (motor/motion) carry one response at a time
What is selection?
- Implies choice, reduction of possible stimuli, narrowing down processing of incoming information, or possible responses
What is early selection?
- Implies that selection occurs before perceptual or interpretive analysis
What is late selection?
- Implies that selection occurs after many stimuli are analyzed to the meaning level/categorical level
What are the different components of the Broadbents Filter Theory?
- Different messages come into input channels, they go into selective filter, one message goes through to the limited capacity decision channel (interacts with LTM) and then response
- one message goes through further processing
- Filter works on basis of physical features
- Early selection model
What are the components of Treismans Attenuation Theory?
- Different signals, unattended channels receive more level of analysis than message that reached awareness, non target information gets attenuated but is not completely lost
- Cocktail party phenomena
- Late selection model
What are the components of Normans Pertinence model?
- Multiple streams of info are let through
- Multiple streams are analyzed with respect to our memory representation
- certain concepts in our LTM that are more pertinent to us and these representations receive extra boost of activation that is more analyzed (goes through filter and comes to awareness)
- Late selection model
What is the research of Yantis and Johnson?
- research question: are unattended stimuli processed to identification (if yes = favor late selection model)
- Method: circular display of letters, presented spatial cue (directing attention), varied location of redundant target
- Results: proximal redundant targets facilitated RT => attended regions of space are processed to identification (late selection)
How do we see visual attentions as a spotlight?
- enhances efficiency of detection within beam of light/attention
- Harder to process info around edges (spatially defined)
Can the spotlight of attention change size?
- Spotlight can change in scope depending on the task
- Research where they changed instruction and so attentional spotlight changed size depending on task
What is the global precedence effect?
- Navon research question: is it easier to ignore global or local features?
- Methods: identify global or local letter, varied congruency (congruent = global F composed of small F, incongruent = global F composed of smaller T)
- Results: found no effect of congruency for global trials but significant congruency effects for local trials = we process global properties before finer grained properties
For visual search, what is parallel/feature search?
- Participants know what the target is in an array of non targets
Feature search is associated with target are very distinct from features that make up the non target
For visual search, what is serial/conjunction search?
- Need to combine more than one kind of visual search (two features together), i.e; find orange AND square
Is there a set size effect (number of objects in display)?
- Inefficient search = conjunction search (target B and other target look like letter B (letter P, so not distinct to target)
- Efficient search = feature search
- Looked at search time
- Results: can analyze to identify level your stimuli in parallel and it is very fast (almost flat function), whereas conjunction search takes longer to search when the set size is bigger
What are the aging effects of conjunction and feature search?
- Methods: tested people age 8 to 80, all unfilled dots and sqaures = conjunction, find filled dot among all unfilled dots = feature
- Results: Conjunction search: regardless of age group showed increase with age => as we age takes longer to search for items in conjunction search, whereas feature search RT is not affected by age