Q2: Lecture 8 Flashcards
early-filter theory
explains how people select information to process (founded by Broadbent)
Cherry (1953)
developed methods that many studies designed to test the predictions of early-filter models were conducted
dichotic listening
people wear a pair of headphones while two different messages are played, with
one message presented to one input channel (i.e., the right ear) and the other message presented to
the other channel (i.e., the left ear)
shadowing
Shadowing involves repeating
aloud the message one is hearing in a to-be-attended channel; used to
prevent “cheating” or channel-switching during dichotic listening
channel-switching
the process of shifting attention between different tasks or mental sets
cocktail party phenomenon
suggests
that attentional shifts may not be controlled solely by the physical characteristics of messages
Treisman (1960)
found
that shadowing was disrupted when the semantic content rather than the physical characteristics of
attended and unattended messages were swapped
Corteen & Wood (1972)
results indicate that the meaningful content of
unattended messages is analyzed to some degree
GSR
Galvanic skin responses; a measure of skin conductance that can indicate emotional arousal and stress
Lackner & Garrett (1972)
employed dichotic listening and shadowing
mulitmode model
cognitive
selection takes place at all stages of processing, both early and late in the information processing
sequence
How does the multimode model replace the early-filter model?
current thinking about
selective attention incorporates the notion that selection takes place at all levels of processing
Johnson & Heinz (1978)
In the
baseline condition there was no distractor message in the unattended channel. In the two
experimental conditions they heard a message that differed from the to-be-attended message in
terms of either physical characteristics or in terms of meaning. As they listened to the messages,
participants were required to detect a visual target (a randomly
presented light) as quickly as possible
resource allocation
the process of distributing cognitive resources (attention and memory) to various tasks or stimuli in the enviornment
automaticity
the ability to perform tasks w/o much conscious effort or attention
Schiffrin & Schneider (1977)
reported data consistent with the idea that extensive experience with a
task can result in the underlying processes becoming automated
Stroop effect
the
unintentional and unconscious nature of word meaning activation
secondary task technique
experimental method where participants perform a secondary task simultaneously with a primary task
Posner & Boies (1971)
attempted to identify a cognitive process so automatic that it makes no
demands upon the limited pool of cognitive resources. They decided that letter encoding was a
process that might fit the bill because for adults it is extremely well-practiced and relatively simple
letter-matching task
participants are tasked with categorizing letter pairs based on physical or name similarities
tone-detection task
a tone would sound, and
participants had to press a special button as quickly as they could. The tone could sound before,
after, or at the same time as the visual presentation of the first letter
Johnson, et al. (1983)
replicated the method of
Posner and Boies (1971), with one modification – they made the
probability of tone presentation the same for all points in time
throughout the letter-matching trials. In other words, they
eliminated the confounding variable to see if RTs would still
suggest that letter encoding requires no cognitive capacity
Barshi & Healy (1993)
A similar disadvantage of automaticity was found in their study; found that the cost of automatized
proofreading was a poorer rate of error detection, and thus demonstrated that automatic processes
are not as desirable as one might think
