Quiz THREE

Question 1

____________ attention is thought to be involuntary and ____________, while ___________ is considered intentional and _______________.

Answer 1

Exogenous/bottom-up; endogenous/top-down

Question 2

Attention helps us deal with

Answer 2

processing and resource limitations,

AND action limitations.

Question 3

In Sperling’s experiment, participants were asked to report the letters present in a 3 x 4 visual array. Some subjects reported all the letters present (full report), while other subjects were given an auditory cue which told them which of the three rows of four letters to report (partial report). What was the result and why was it important?

Answer 3

Subjects saw about 4-5 letters in full report and > 3 letters per row (on average) in partial report. This suggested that visual sensory memory was not the initial processing bottleneck because more information was available if attended to.

– partial report suggested that more than 9 items (letters) were potentially available in sensory memory if attended to. This means that sensory memory was not the initial bottleneck. The attentional filter after this was the limit.

Question 4

In lecture, we discussed the notion of channels for attention. Which of the following most accurately describes what we mean as a channel?

Answer 4

A channel is a coherent sensory stream that could be a focus of attention.

this is a fuzzy concept, but it is essentially any coherent sensory stream that is (or could be) the focus of attention.

Question 5

In a dichotic listening experiment, participants are typically able to ignore one channel while closely following an attended channel. This is known as the ___________________ effect.

Answer 5

cocktail party effect

Question 6

Perceptual enhancement typically increases both the signal and noise in an entire channel. This is most consistent with which of the following models of attention discussed in lecture?

Answer 6

Early selection filter models

– If you enhance the entire channel, attention is acting early in the process to select everything (signal + noise) present.

Question 7

Treisman & Schmidt (1982) did an experiment in which subjects were to report the identity of black numbers presented very briefly. A number of colored objects (circles, triangles, squares) were also presented. It was found that participants would sometimes mistakenly report the objects with colors of different objects present. These types of mistakes are known as _________________________.

Answer 7

illusory conjunctions

Question 8

why are illusory conjunctions important?

Answer 8

– because it suggests that when your attention is distracted, you aren’t able to bind features (colors, shapes, and locations) as effectively.

Question 9

When a highly salient stimulus is presented in the environment, it can capture your attention. Which of the functions of attention discussed so far would be responsible for quickly attending to the salient stimulus?

Answer 9

Focusing