Selective attention Flashcards
What did William James (1890) say attention was?
“Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought”
What did Harold Pashler say attention was?
“No one knows what attention is. There may not even be an “it” there to be known about (although of course there might be).”
What study did Cherry (1953) conduct?
- Dichotic listening
- ‘Shadow’ the message to one ear and ignore the message in the other ear
- Two different passages being spoken in each ear
- More likely to focus on one message
What did Cherry find in his study?
- After shadowing, participants were asked about the semantic content of the ‘unattended’ message
- They didn’t notice if the language changed from English to German or if the speech was reversed
- They could report the gender of the speaker and whether the message contained speech or non-speech
What did Cherry conclude?
- People process ‘unattended’ information ONLY to the level of physical features
- No semantic information is available from the ‘unattended’ message
- Known as the cocktail party problem
What is the Early selection model (Broadbent 1958)?
- Filtering occurs at an early stage of analysis (prior to meaning)
- Brain filters out any message not having appropriate ‘physical’ characteristics
- Senses – sensory buffer – selective filter – limited capacity processor
What is Moray (1959) the two alternative forced choice procedure?
- Even a word repeated 35 times was not recognised
- But if that word was the participant’s own name, they often would report hearing it (only for one third of participants)
What is the split span experiment?
Gray and Wedderburn (1960)
- ‘Split-span’ experiment
- 40% reported by ear
- 60% reported by meaning
- So it seemed like the ‘unattended’ message was processed for content after all (at least by 60% of people)
What is the Late-selection model?
- Deutsch and Deutsch (1963)
- All inputs are encoded and analysed in parallel to a semantic level
- Selective filtering only occurs at the stage of conscious awareness
- Senses – unconscious semantic processing – selective filter – conscious attention
What did Corteen and Dunn (1974) do with electric shocks?
- Training: City names paired with electric shock. Subjects sweat when they hear any city name.
- Test: Shadow one ear and ignore other. Press a button if you hear a city name in either ear.
- Measures: galvanic skin responses (GSRs) and button presses to city names.
What did Corteen and Dunn (1974) find in their shock study?
- 42% of city names in ‘unattended’ ear elicit a GSR (30% for non-shock-associated city names)
- On only 2% of these trials did the participant make a button press response
- Different measures of awareness of ‘unattended’ stimuli give different results
What is the Attenuator model -Treisman (1964)?
- Unattended information is ‘attenuated’ (not filtered out completely)
- All inputs are analysed for meaning (but some signals are now weaker than others)
- The dictionary analysis units act as the final filter
- Different words have different trigger thresholds (e.g. your name has a low threshold)
- Senses – attenuating filter – dictionary analysis filter
What did Neisser and Becklen (1975) find when looking at video targets?
- Monitoring one video for targets leaves people unaware of events in the unmonitored video
- People incredulous when told
What did Simons and Chabris (1999) do in the gorilla experiment?
- Around 50% of people fail to notice the gorilla when attending to the team in white T-shirts
- More likely to notice if carrying out an ‘easy’ task than if carrying out a ‘hard’ task
- More likely to notice gorilla if attending to team in black T-shirts
What did Dalton and Fraenkel (2012) do in the auditory gorilla experiment?
- 70% of people fail to notice the auditory gorilla man when attending to the women’s conversation
- 90% notice him when attending to the men’s conversation
- All participants but one notice him in the full attention control
