Psych #4 - Attention and Consciousness Flashcards
What is selective attention?
Focusing conscious awareness on one particular stimulus
What is limited attention?
It is when you divide your attention between multiple tasks
What is an example of limited attention?
Cocktail party effect, our ability to attend to only one voice within a sea of many as you chat with a party guest
What is Inattentional blindness?
It is when we fail to perceive something when our attention is focused elswhere
What is an example of inattentional blindness?
Missing the gorilla walking by when you are focused on how many times the ball is being passed between people.
What is change blindess?
Observers’ inability to notice changes in their environment
What are examples of change blindness?
- Person swap paradigm
- Flicker paradigm
What is the person swap paradigm?
The experimenter asks someone on the street for directions halfway through they swap the experimenter with someone else. Not that many people noticed the swap
What is the flicker paradigm?
Four photos are tested in a sequence. Photo 1, blank screen, photo 2 (slightly altered photo 1), blank screen again and it usually takes a long time for someone to notice the difference.
What is the Moore and Egeth study of visual illusions and inattentional blindess?
Used visual illusions like the Muller Lyer illusion. People were susceptible to the illusion even if they did not consciously process the stimuli that caused the illusion.
When do stimuli “capture” attention and why?
It’s meaningful: your own name captures your attention
You’re expecting it: if you watch bear/gorilla video again you’ll be more likely to see it
It’s interesting/complex: a happy vs. simple geometric shapes
What is preconscious processing?
The items that currently lie outside our conscious awareness, some may be may conscious, some may never get into conscious awareness.
Much of it is easy to bring to awareness
What are het two phenomena’s about preconscious processing?
- We sometimes have difficulty raising items from preconscious to conscious. (top of the tongue phenomenon)
- Stimuli that we are not aware of can still affect us (effects of subliminal priming and blindsight)
What is the tip of the tongue phenomenon?
You know that you know the word but you cannot fully retrieve the word. Occurs about once or twice, a week for college students, more often as we get older
What is a common example of Tip of the Tongue Experience?
Often happens with people’s names, but also for common nouns. Sometimes you might know the letter their name starts with or syllables but not the actual name
What is blindsight?
Blindsight is another way in which stimuli we are not aware of can affect our behavior.
Person cannot consciously see a certain portion of their visual field but still behave in some instances as if they can see it
Being aware of perceiving something is distinguishable from just perceiving something
What is automatic processing?
- Required no conscious control
- Little effort required
- Subcomponents can be performed in parallel
- doesn’t consume much attentional resources
- Performed quickly
- Familiar, well-practiced tasks
What is controlled processing?
- Requires conscious control
- Effortful
- One step at a time (serial)
- Consumes our attentional resources
- Performed more slowly
- novel tasks
What is the Stroop task?
Interference effects between two tasks, one relatively automated and one that’s less automated.
We have difficulty selectively attending to a less automated task that competes with a more automated tasks.
Reading vs. naming colors
What is the visual search paradigm?
- Actively searching for a target in a field of distractors.
- Number of targets and distracters influence accuracy
- Contrast feature search vs. conjunctive search
What is feature search?
Find presence of one feature in the array. Find the red letter in a field of blue letters
What is a conjunctive search?
Find the conjunctions of 2 or more features together. Find a red Z in a field of red and blue Zs and Ms
What is Treisman’s Feature-Integration Theory?
Individual feature processing, conjunctive searching, Can get illusory conjunctions under some conditions (show blues squares and red triangles)
What is the individual feature processing (Trisman’s feature-integration theory)?
It is done in parallel. Simultaneous processing is done on the whole display and if feature is present – we detect it.
What is conjunctive searching (Treisman’s feature-integration theory)
Requires attention to the integration or combination of the features. Attention to particular combination of features must be done sequentially to detect presence of a certain combination.
What is an example of a feature search?
Find the red x in a sea of white x’s. This is easy and automatic.