Module 13: Attention

Question 1

Sustained Attention

Answer 1

vigilance, such as that required when watching for a rare event (TSA watching for carryon items not allowed)

Question 2

Divided Attention

Answer 2

allow us to determine how well indiv can attend to many sources of info at once

Question 3

Spatial Attention

Answer 3

how we focus on one part of our environment and how we move attention to other locations in the environment

Question 4

Selective Attention

Answer 4

some information is attended to while other information is intentionally blocked out

Question 5

Dichotic Listening Studies

Answer 5

Refers to the situtaion in which 2 messages are presented simultaneously to an individual, with 1 message in each ear

• Individual is aksed to shador one of the messages as he hears it
• Typically people can tell physical characteristics of ignored message, but not he language of the message

Question 6

Boardbents Filter Model

Answer 6

People select information on the basis of physical features: sensory channel that message comes in, pitch of voice, color/font of visual message

Question 7

Tresiman’s Attentuation Model

Answer 7

We do monitor the unattended information to some degress on the basis of its meaning

• Selection starts at the physical or perceptual level, the unattended information is not blocked completely, just weakened or attenuated
• Highly meaningful/pertinent information in unattended ear will get through the filler for further processing

Question 8

Late Selection Models

Answer 8

Al information in the unattended ear is processed on the basis of meaning, not just the selected or highly pertinent information
- You don’t have to be aware of or attending a message for it to be fully processed for meaning

Question 9

Multimode Model

Answer 9

The stage at which selection occurs can change depending on the task
- Under the right conditions we can select what to attend to on the basis of the meaning of the messages

Question 10

Divided Attention Tasks

Answer 10

each task is evaluated separately, in order to determine baseline performance when the individual can allocate as many cognitive resources as necessary to one task at a time.

• evaluated when the two tasks are performed simultaneously
• A decrease in performance for either task would suggest that even if attention can be divided or switched between the tasks, the cognitive demands are too great to avoid disruption of performance

Question 11

Inattentional Blindness

Answer 11

failure to notice unexpected objects or events when attention is focused elsewhere
- Gorilla Experiment

Question 12

Inattentional Deafness

Answer 12

The auditory analog of in-attentional blindness. People fail to notice an unexpected sound or voice when attention is devoted to other aspects of a scene

Question 13

How are we able to survive as a species then?

Answer 13

• Our ability to focus attention intently might have been more evolutionarily useful than the ability to notice unexpected events
• Most events don’t require our immediate attention