Selective attention

Question 1

What did Treisman and Moray find about focused attention to one of two simultaneous speech messages?

Answer 1

• not successful if speeches only differed semantically and not physically
• participants noticed physical changes (e.g. location) but not semantic (e.g. psuedowords)
• word repeated 35 times in unattended message is not remembered better than word heard once

Question 2

What happens to unattended words

Answer 2

they are filtered out after an analysis of physical attributes before access to identity/meaning

Question 3

What was Broadbent’s dichotic split-span experiment

Answer 3

people heard different numbers in each ear.

Ps found it easier to recall a switch in ear use halfway through than repeatedly.

Question 4

What is Broadbent’s filter model

Answer 4

• sensory features of all speech sources are processed in parallel and stored briefly in sensory memory
• a selective filter is directed only to one source at a time
• filter is early processing so only info passed through is recognised and has a meaning

Question 5

What are two additional assumptions of Broadbents account

Answer 5

• filter is all-or-none

- filter is obligatory ‘structural’ bottleneck

Question 6

Examples of a partial breakthrough of meaning in unattended speech

Answer 6

• own name noticed (Moray, 1959)

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Question 7

What is the filter-attenuation theory (Treisman, 1969)

Answer 7

• there is an early filter but it is not all-or-none
• it attenuates unattended sources
• early filtering is an optional strategy (not a fixed bottle neck)

Question 8

Experiment example of early selection not as a structural bottleneck (Treisman and Riley, 1969)

Answer 8

Combination of shadowing and monitoring.
Ps had to shadow right ear until they heard a letter in either ear

In the experiment, they heard numbers in the right and the occasional letter in the left.

Question 9

Efficiancy of early selection depends on what

Answer 9

perceptual load (Lavie)

Question 10

What experiment showed inattentional blindness

Answer 10

Simon and Chabris gorilla experiment

Ps attended to one stream of visual events overlapping with another stream.
highly salient events in the unattended stream are missed.

Hence, although in the visual field, the events were not processed to the level of meaning

Question 11

What is the Posner paradigm

Answer 11

Ps given two boxes and an arrow predicts which way a letter or digit will appear by 80%.

Attentional spotlight

Question 12

What does endogenous queueing have an advantgae in?

Answer 12

cognitive processing

Question 13

exogneous attraction is much faster than…

Answer 13

endogenous movemtns

Question 14

What did Mangun et al find about voluntary attention to a spatial locus and ERP

Answer 14

Brain activity is larger in P1 when stimulus was in the intended location rather than the unintended location.

Question 15

What did O’Conner et al find about early selection in priamry visual cortex and even LGN

Answer 15

Retina –> LGN –> V1 –>

Question 16

Is visual selection all-or-none or optional

Answer 16

optional

Question 17

What is the Flanker test (Lavie)

Answer 17

press left key for little x, right key for little z, on midline, ignore big letter above or below mid-line

Question 18

What is defensive filtering

Answer 18

protecting higher-level limited-capacity systems (e.g. syntactic parsing from overload (Broadbent)

Question 19

What is positive selection-for-action

Answer 19

prioritising one of several possible objects or sources for action or further processing (allport)

Question 20

what is change blindness

Answer 20

information about unattended objects not carried over from one fixation to the next

Question 21

what is feature-integration theory

Answer 21

• to bind features of the same object from difference maps into an object description, we need focl attention to a location
• implication 1: find a target identified only by conjunction of features
• implication 2: features are free-floating in relation to each other until attended