Problem 1: Attention Flashcards
What is inattentional blindness/deafness?
A failure to notice unexpected objects or events when attention is focused elsewhere, similar with hearing. In an experiment in which participants listened to a ‘multidimensional’ conversation and the sound of a gorilla was added, they failed to notice the gorilla.
Dichotic listening task & selective listening
Task: hearing two different spoken texts through a pair of earphones, you have to repeat only 1 by using selective listening (listening to the thing you select)
Who did the gorilla experiment first?
Neisser
When are people more likely to notice unexpected objects?
when they share features with the objects they have to attend to & when they put more effort in
Is everyone equally oblivious to the gorilla sound? Do we all experience inattentional blindness equally?
Some studies found that greater working memory capacity resulted in people being more likely to notice unexpected items. However, other studies did not find that. Conclusion: inconclusive
what is the cocktail party phenomenon?
the process of tracking one conversation in the face of the distraction of other conversations
What happened in a dichotic listening talk in which a conversation changed?
people were able to notice a voice changing from male to female, but not from French to German for example. Physical, sensory changes were better noticed than semantic changes
what is a filter type of theory?
blocks of information come through, but only a part of the information is selected to go to the next stage
what is a bottleneck type of theory?
all information passes through, but because it is not selected, the time used for processing is slowed down because not all information can pass through at the same time
What type of theory is Broadbent’s model of attention and what does it entail?
It is a filter theory.
He says: we filter information right after it comes in at the sensory level, but we only analyse what is attended to. Unattended information will not pass through the selective filter into the perceptual processes and short term memory.
What type of theory is Moray’s selective filter model and what does it entail?
It is a filter theory.
Moray says that because people hear their name in conversations they were not paying attention to, there must be a selective filter. Messages of high importance will break through that filter
What type of theory is Treisman’s attenuation Model and what does it entail?
it is filter theory.
Treisman proposes that instead of blocking out stimuli, the filter weakens (attenuates) the strength of the stimuli other than the target stimuli. When they reach us we analyze them for target properties, in they possess them -> they are analysed for meaning & relevance
What type of theory is Deutsch & Deutsch’s Late-Filter Model and what does it entail?
It is a filter theory.
They state that stimuli are filtered after analysing them for property and meaning, if they are important they are recognised even in the unattended ear
What is the attentional blink?
the impaired ability to identify the second of 2 visual stimuli presented in close succession
In a study on the attentional blink, in which they tested whether music, thinking of a holiday/going shopping, nothing, or a reward would aid in performing a visual attentional blink task (showing letters, having to report the second letter for example), what were the results?
that performance improved when the task was accompanied by task-irrelevant mental activity
