Topic 4 - Attention

Question 1

Two kinds of attention?

Answer 1

Selective and divided attention

Question 2

Selective attention describes our attempts to

Answer 2

withdraw from certain aspects of our sensory environment with the aim of focusing on other aspects of our environment

Question 3

Divided attention describes our attempts to

Answer 3

do more than one thing at once.

Question 4

Attentional Capture describes certain

Answer 4

stimuli or events that automatically draw attention to
themselves. These stimuli might be highly salient (loud bang, bright flash) or might also be of evolutionary significance (more often than not, threatening).

• This might result in Visual Scanning.

Question 5

Attentional distraction

Answer 5

is when one stimulus interrupts our ability to pay attention to another. This might be slightly different from Attentional Capture in that the cause of Distraction might be goal-oriented rather than stimulus-driven.

Question 6

Types of selective attention theories?

Answer 6

Early, intermediate, late selection.

Question 7

EARLY SELECTION

Answer 7

• cocktail part effect

- dicotic listening

Question 8

dicotic listening shadowing experiment

Answer 8

2 messages in seperate ears and told to listen to one, then asked about the unattended ear, only gross phsyical properties of the unattended message were remembered. No matter the message or if by a male or female ppl couldn’t remember the unattended ears message

Question 9

From sensory to memory pathway for dicotic listening shadowing experiment

Answer 9

2 messages enter sensory memory, then into the filter, one will continues into the detector and the other decays, the one message in the detector goes into memory.

Question 10

Early selection suggests that attention operates on the basis of

Answer 10

Physical properties

Question 11

Default organisation in attention seems to be based

Answer 11

on ear of delivery (channel). Again, attention operates on basis of physical characteristics.

Question 12

Dicot listening experiment:

Does order matter and how

Answer 12

Ppl can rember the order form one ear to the other, but cannot remember an alternating order (LRLRLRLR)

Question 13

Early selection bottleneck theory

Answer 13

Rejects all but one message at the beginning (top) of the bottleneck. That one message operates on physical characteristics.

Question 14

Dicot listening experiment:

• when their name was pit into the unattended ear

Wheat does it mean?

Answer 14

33% recalled their own name form the unattended ear,

Means that this opposes that attention operates solely on physical properties, but also on semantic properties (meaning)

Question 15

__________ conducted pioneering work into the cocktail party effect- how we tune into certain conversations and what we sacrifice in unattended channels. How selective is selective attention?

Answer 15

Cherry (1953)

Question 16

Evidence was growing for the early selection account of ___________. However, there were also evidence to the contrary. (Semantic and not just physical properties)

Answer 16

Broadbent (1958)

Question 17

Late selection operates only after

Answer 17

Meaning has been processed

Question 18

Late selection

Answer 18

Disambiguated words heard in the unattended ear that had meaning influenced the perception of the messages coming form the attended ear. Therfore meaning matters a lot, and that late selection only occurs AFTER meaning has been processed.

Question 19

Evidence for late selection can be found in the work of ________. This data suggest that selection takes place at the level of meaning!

Answer 19

MacKay (1973)

Question 20

Intermediate selection

Answer 20

Attention operates on basis of physical characteristics (left, right) or language (words, numbers) or meaning (sense, nonsense)

Question 21

Intermediate selection pathway

Answer 21

2 Message go into the attenuator (turns one message up or down) ——>
Then into the dictionary unit where they are both analyzed.
——->
Then attention is given on the basis of physical properties, language, or meaning.

Question 22

Activating the dictionary unit then is an interaction between the

Answer 22

attended channel and content. Content that has a low threshold [insert your name here] might breakthrough on the unattended channel.

Question 23

________ argued against an all-or-nothing physical filter and rather for the attenuation of messages that were not the focus of attention.

Answer 23

Treisman (1964)

Question 24

What determines whether late or early selection takes place

Answer 24

The complexity of our environment, or the degree of our perpetual load

Question 25

Selective attention is more likely to be late under _______ conditions, and is more likely to be early selection under ________ conditions

Answer 25

low load

high load

Question 26

_______ has identified a crucial factor in determining whether selective attention takes place- the level of difficulty of the current task.

Answer 26

Lavie (1995)

Question 27

What low load and high load? What’s the differences ?

Answer 27

Low load is when you only have 2 or very few stimuli together. Simple environment.

• faster rxn time.
• compatible faster then incompatible

High load is when you have many stimuli together in a complex environment.

• slower rxn time
• compatible and incompatible have equal rxn time with one another.

Question 28

Because theres no difference between compatible and incompatible stimuli, therfore under

Answer 28

high perceptual load,, we no longer take into account irrelevant info.

Question 29

The idea here is that gamers have been exposed to complex visual environments, so the degree of visual expertise may be greater then non gamers.

So if perceptual load is a determinant of selective attention, in that we start to

Answer 29

ignore stimuli when the load is high, then gamers may be able to hold more info in mind then in gamers, so they may be sensitive to irrelevant information, even under high load.

Question 30

EARLY SELECTION

More likely with

Answer 30

high load, difficult task

Question 31

LATE SELECTION More likely with

Answer 31

low load, easy task

Question 32

Stroop effect

Answer 32

Saying color of words that its printed in rather then what it spells out

CONGRUENT CONDITION <
NEUTRAL CONDITION <
INCONGRUENT CONDITION

Question 33

In the stroop effect, there’s a failure of

_________. Why?

Answer 33

selective attention.

The meaning of the word interferes with our a ability to say the color the words printed in.

Question 34

STIMULUS-DRIVEN CAPTURE

Answer 34

we need attention to be OUT of our control for potentially dangerous stimuli (e.g., impending polar bear attack). Other times, stimuli seem to capture our attention because of processing commonality (e.g., reading words).

Question 35

STRATEGIC CAPTURE

Answer 35

we need attention to be IN our control when we attempt goal-directed action (e.g., acing next week’s mid-term). However, these forms of strategic attention may lead us to ignore other bits of the environment.

Question 36

Changes in visual attention are largely accompanied by

Answer 36

• OVERT physical shifts in head and eye movement.
• SACCADE movement are replaced by period of FIXATION.

We do not perceive motion during these movements.

Question 37

Visual attention is guided via

Answer 37

salience maps in a bottom-up way in that we fixate on salient objects of high contrast or brightness but we also employ top-down guidance when we know what to look for

Question 38

Which processing is used for visual attention

Answer 38

Top-down

Question 39

Pre-cueing experiments can determine the

Answer 39

benefits (and costs) in terms of environmental expectation. All other things being equal, valid spatial cueing produces faster simple reaction times than invalid spatial cueing.

• no cue
• double cue
• centre cue
• spatial cue
• alerting benefit
• orienting benefit

Question 40

Alerting benefit

Answer 40

[NO – DOUBLE = alerting benefit]

tells you the attentional benefit in knowing WHEN a stimulus is going to arrive

Question 41

Orienting benefit

Answer 41

CENTER - SPATIAL = orienting benefit]

tells you the attentional benefit in knowing WHERE a stimulus is going to arrive (orienting benefit)

Question 42

Visual processing seems to benefit from attention being directed to a

Answer 42

single point in space. This is space-based visual attention

Question 43

Attention to visual objects:

• Object C represents different object and different location —-> reaction time is ____
• Object B represents same object and different location ——> reaction time is _____

Since B is faster then C, it suggest that we organize visual attention..

Answer 43

Slow
Fast

not only to space, but also to object, same objects will be organize and recognized faster then different objects.

Question 44

Attention to Auditory objects:

Sounds 1 measured on:
Sound 2 measured on

Answer 44

[PITCH] [WARBLE] [CLIMATE] [DIRECTION]

[SIZE] [GAP] [TILT] [TEXTURE]

Question 45

Attention to auditory objects:

Principle here:

Answer 45

asking 2 pieces of info about the same object is better then asking for 2 pieces of info on 2 different objects (like size and texture… not good), because of this object based organization.

Question 46

FEATURE INTEGRATION THEORY

Answer 46

attempts to account for the relative ease (or difficulty) of visual search, and, resolve the binding problem.

Question 47

According to feature integration theory, how are objects formed?

Answer 47

Objects are formed via attention and the combination of basic visual features such as colour, orientation and shape.

Question 48

Feature integration theory pathway

Answer 48

Object perception (Leading to illusory conjunction of features and false objects)

Question 49

The possibility of illusory conjunctions can be increased with damage to the

Answer 49

parietal lobe damage (cf., Balint’s Syndrome).

Question 50

How does the parietal lobe Take part in this binding issue, the idea where we take

Answer 50

colors, shapes and sizes in individual locations and piece them together to form objects. With damage to the parietal lobe, this leads to incorrect combinations of those basic features.

Question 51

Damage to parietal lobe leads to

Answer 51

Balints syndrome

Question 52

Divided attention kinds of processes

Answer 52

Controlled and automatic processes

Question 53

CONTROLLED PROCESSES

Answer 53

• CONSCIOUS CONTROL
• DEMAND EFFORT
• SLOW TO PERFORM
• PERFORMED SERIALLY

Done when beginning practicing a skill

Question 54

AUTOMATIC PROCESSES

Answer 54

NO CONSCIOUS CONTROL

• DEMAND LESS EFFORT
• FAST TO PERFORM
• PERFORMED IN PARALLEL

Done when skill has been mastered

Question 55

The success of attention appears to depend on a number of factors:

Answer 55

A) environmental complexity

B) environmental threat

C) number of attentional sources

D) number of distracting sources

E) nature of relevant information

F) nature of irrelevant information

Question 56

Driving, like bouncing a bat and ball, undergoes a classic transformation from ______ to ______ processing.

Answer 56

controlled to automatic processing

Question 57

________ identify characteristics of automatic processes including the use of little resource and employment without intention

Answer 57

Schneider & Shiffrin (1977)

Question 58

When stimuli are in the variable mapping and also part of the

Answer 58

memory set, then they will be recalled, the more trialed, the better the performance.

Question 59

Elements of our environment cannot be consistently mapped to target relevant or target irrelevant, they move

Answer 59

BETWEEN relevant and irrelevant in a trial-trial basis.

And so performance of variable mapping never gets as efficient as consistent mapping

Question 60

What contributes to whether a process ends up being automatic or controlled?

Answer 60

the way in which elements are mapped to tasks in the environment.

• Continuously or variably

Question 61

Consistent mapping allow for

Answer 61

relevance and irrelevance to be maintained over significant periods of time.

Question 62

Variable mapping

Answer 62

does not allow for such maintenance and so automatic processes cannot kick in.

Question 63

When we attempt to perform more than one thing at once, this may lead to a

Answer 63

dual-task decrement.

Question 64

Strayer et al. (2003) found that the dual-task decrement was most prominent during high density traffic. Nattering participants took less notice of billboards and were slower to reach a required minimum speed. There were no significant differences between hands-free and hands-on mobile phone use.

Answer 64

Task A: driving
Task B: mobile phone use
The combination of task A and B is when the decrement in performance occurs.