PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Question 1

the ability to
focus on specific stimuli or
locations

Answer 1

Attention:

Question 2

attending to one thing

while ignoring others

Answer 2

Selective Attention:

Question 3

one stimulus interfering with the
processing of another
stimulus

Answer 3

• Distraction:

Question 4

paying
attention to more than one
thing at a time

Answer 4

• Divided Attention:

Question 5

a rapid shifting of attention
usually caused by a
stimulus such as a loud
noise, bright light, or
sudden movement

Answer 5

Attentional Capture:

Question 6

: eye
movements from one
location or object to
another

Answer 6

Visual Scanning

Question 7

An experiment by Colin

Cherry through the use of

Answer 7

dichotic listening

technique

Question 8

– shadowing

Answer 8

Attended ear

Question 9

Cherry found that
participants could identify if it
was a female’s voice or a
male’s voice in the
unattended ear, but could not
report what was said.

Answer 9

Broadbent’s Filter Model of

Attention

Question 10

participants were unaware
of a word that had been
repeated 35 times in the
unattended ear

Answer 10

Neville Moray (1959)

Question 11

ability to focus on one
stimulus while filtering out
other stimuli

Answer 11

Cocktail Party Effect:

Question 12

•holds all incoming information for a fraction of a

second and transfers to the filter

Answer 12

Sensory Memory:

Question 13

dentifies the message that is being attended to based on its
physical characteristics, lets attended message to pass through the
detector in the next stage

Answer 13

• Filter: i

Question 14

processes the information from the attended message to
determine higher-level characteristics of the message such as its
meaning

Answer 14

• Detector:

Question 15

Output of the detector is sent to STM which holds information for and also transfers information into LTM

Answer 15

10-

15 seconds

Question 16

Broadbent’s model is called an because the filter eliminates the unattended information
right at the beginning of the flow of information

Answer 16

early selection model

Question 17

shadow
message presented to one
ear and ignore message
presented to the other ear presented
listener’s name to the
unattended ear, about a third
of the participants detected it

Answer 17

• Moray (1959):

Question 18

experiment | participant’s
attention jumped from one
ear to the other and then
back again

Answer 18

Gray and Wedderburn

(1960): “Dear Aunt Jane”

Question 19

– participants took the
meaning of the words into
account (Dear 7 Jane, 9 Aunt
6)

Answer 19

Gray and Wedderburn

(1960): top-down processing

Question 20

selection occurred in two stages

and replaced Broadbent’s filter with an attenuator

Answer 20

Anne Treisman (1964):

Question 21

: analyzes the incoming message in terms of
physical characteristics (high or low-pitched, fast or slow),
language (how the message groups into syllables or words),
meaning (how sequences of words create meaningful phrases)

Answer 21

Attenuator

Question 22

• : language
and meaning can be used to separate messages
Treisman’s Attenuation Model of Attention: both messages
pass through the attenuator but the attended message
emerges at full strength and the unattended message are
attenuated (present but weaker than attended message)

Answer 22

Treisman’s Attenuation Model of Attention

Question 23

smallest signal strength that can barely be detected

low threshold – hearing our name from across the room

Answer 23

• Threshold:

Question 24

contains words, stored in memory, each of

which has a threshold for being activated

Answer 24

Dictionary Unit:

Question 25

participant listened to an
ambiguous sentence in the
attended ear while biasing
words were presented in
the unattended ear
the word must have been
processed to the level of
meaning even though it
was unattended

Answer 25

Donald MacKay (1973):

Question 26

amount of information people
can handle and sets a limit
on their ability to process
incoming information

Answer 26

Processing Capacity:

Question 27

most of the
incoming information is
processed to the level of
meaning before the message
to be further processed is
selected

Answer 27

• Late Selection Models of

Attention:

Question 28

related to

the difficulty of a task

Answer 28

• Perceptual Load:

Question 29

use up
only a small amount of the
person’s processing capacity

Answer 29

• Low-load Tasks:

Question 30

use more
of a person’s processing
capacity

Answer 30

• High-load Tasks:

Question 31

studied the role of
processing capacity and
perceptual loads in
determining distraction by
presenting displays (upper
left)
participants’ task
was to respond as quickly
as possible when they
identified a target, either X
or N | press one key for X,
another key for N

Answer 31

Sophie Forster and Lavie

(2008):

Question 32

– hard
task resulting in longer
reaction times than the easy
task | task-irrelevant stimulus
– responding slows for the
easy task more than for the
hard task

Answer 32

Sophie Forster and Lavie

(2008): reaction times

Question 33

that use
few cognitive resources
may leave resources
available for processing
unattended task-irrelevant
stimuli

Answer 33

Load Theory of Attention: low-load tasks

Question 34

that use
all of a person’s cognitive
resources don’t leave any
resources to process
unattended task-irrelevant
stimuli

Answer 34

• Load Theory of Attention:

high-load tasks

Question 35

first
described by J.R. Stroop in
1935 | task-irrelevant
stimuli are extremely
powerful – reading words
is highly practiced and has
become automatic

Answer 35

Stroop Effect:

Question 36

hold information
about target stimuli in memory and
pay attention to a series of
“distractor” stimuli to determine
whether one of the target stimuli is
present among these distractor
stimuli

Answer 36

Walter Schneider & Richard

Shiffrin (1977):

Question 37

practice made it possible for
participants to divide their
attention to deal with all of
the target and test items
simultaneously

Answer 37

Schneider & Shiffrin:

Question 38

processing that occurs
without intention and at a
cost of only some of a
person’s cognitive resources

Answer 38

Automatic Processing:

Question 39

In 80% of the crashes and
67% of the near crashes,
the driver was inattentive in
some way BBB seconds
beforehand

Answer 39

3

Question 40

simulated
driving task that required
drivers to apply the brakes as
quickly as possible in
response to a red light

Answer 40

David Strayer and William

Johnston (2001):

Question 41

simulated
driving task that required
drivers to apply the brakes as
quickly as possible in
response to a red light
participants
talking on a cell phone missed
twice as many of the red lights
compared to when they
weren’t talking on the phone
\: same
decrease in performance
occurred regardless of
whether participants used a
hands-free or a handheld
device

Answer 41

• David Strayer and William

Johnston (2001):

Question 42

concluded that
talking on the phone uses
mental resources that would
otherwise be used for driving
the caR

Answer 42

Strayer and coworkers

(2013):

Question 43

92% of college students
report they have texted,
browsed the web, sent
pictures, or visited social
networks during class time

Answer 43

Tindall & Bohlander (2012):

Question 44

checked college
students’ phone bills and
determined that the students
send an average of 58 text
messages a day

Answer 44

Judith Gold and coworkers

(2015):

Question 45

• showed that during a
15-minute study session,
students averaged less than
6 minutes on-task before
interrupting studying to
stretch, watch TV, access
websites, or use technology

Answer 45

Rosen and coworkers

(2013):

Question 46

method of determining
ongoing daily behaviors such
as texting | “what percentage
of the time during the day are
people engaged in a specific
behavior

Answer 46

Experience Sampling:

Question 47

constant switching from

one activity to another

Answer 47

Continuous Partial

Attention: Rose (2010) |

Question 48

“the
solution is not to bemoan
technology, but to develop
strategies of self-control, as
we do with every other
temptation in life”

Answer 48

Steven Pinker (2010):

Question 49

thoughts
coming from within;
daydreaming | extremely
prevalent, distracting enough
to disrupt an ongoing task

Answer 49

• Mind Wandering:

Question 50

used
experience sampling
technique to contact people
at random intervals during
the day and ask them “ What
are you doing right now?

mind
wandering occurred 47% of
the time and occurred when
people were involved in a
wide range of activities

Answer 50

Matthew Killingsworth &
Daniel Gilbert (2010):

Question 51

what
happens while reading when
one suddenly realizes that he
has no idea what he has just
read because he was
thinking of something else

Answer 51

• Mindless Reading or

Zoned-Out Reading:

Question 52

becomes activated
when a person is not
involved in a task

Answer 52

Default Mode Network

(DMN):

Question 53

occurs before we focus attention on
an object | researchers argue that this stage is automatic,
unconscious, and effortless because attention is not
involved

Answer 53

Preattentive Stage:

Question 54

features of objects are analyzed
independently in separate areas of the brain and are
not yet associated with a specific object

Answer 54

• Preattentive Stage:

Question 55

attention is focused on an
object and the independent features are combined,
causing the observer to become consciously aware of the
rolling red ball

Answer 55

• Focused Attention Stage:

Question 56

• The idea that an object is automatically broken into
features may seem counterintuitive because we always
see whole objects, not objects that have been divided into
individual features
• The reason we aren’t aware of this process of feature
analysis is that it occurs early in the perceptual process,
before we have become conscious of the object.

Answer 56

Feature Integration Theory

Question 57

presented
displays Fig 4.31 | flashed for 1/5
of a second, followed by a
random-dot masking field
designed to eliminate any residual
perception that might remain after
the stimuli were turned off

Answer 57

Evidence for Feature Integration
Theory
• Treisman and Schmidt

Question 58

• Report black numbers first
and then to report what they
saw at each four locations
where the shapes had been
• Participants had to divide
their attention across two tasks
• On about 1/5 of the trials,
participants recorded
seeing shapes that were
made up of a combination
of features from two
different stimuli

Answer 58

Evidence for Feature

Integration Theory

Question 59

combinations of features
from different stimuli | can
occur even if the stimuli
differ greatly in shape and
size

Answer 59

Illusory Conjunctions:

Question 60

occur because
in the preattentive stage,
each feature exists
independently of the others –
free floating (not attached to
a particular object)

Answer 60

• Treisman: illusory

conjunctions

Question 61

R.M.’s
case who had his parietal
lobe damaged | an inability
to focus attention on
individual objects

Answer 61

Balint’s Syndrome:

Question 62

lack of focused
attention would make it
difficult for R.M. to combine
features correctly

Answer 62

• Feature Integration

Theory:

Question 63

involves mostly
bottom-up processing
because knowledge is
usually not involved

Answer 63

Feature Analysis

Approach:

Question 64

using Fig 4.33,
asked participants to
identify the objects | an
interchange in color and
shape
 when participants
were told that they were
being shown a carrot, a lake,
and a tire, illusory
conjunctions were less likely
to occur
 participants’
knowledge of the usual
colors of objects influenced
their ability to correctly
combine the features of each
object

Answer 64

Treisman and Schmidt

(1982):

Question 65

a
visual search task | useful for
studying binding because
finding the target in a
conjunction search involves
scanning a display in order to
focus attention at a specific
location
attention to a location is
required for a conjunction
search | Fig 4.34b • Feature Search: Fig 4.34a

Answer 65

Conjunction Search: