Topic 4 - Attention Flashcards
Two kinds of attention?
Selective and divided attention
Selective attention describes our attempts to
withdraw from certain aspects of our sensory environment with the aim of focusing on other aspects of our environment
Divided attention describes our attempts to
do more than one thing at once.
Attentional Capture describes certain
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.
Attentional distraction
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.
Types of selective attention theories?
Early, intermediate, late selection.
EARLY SELECTION
- cocktail part effect
- dicotic listening
dicotic listening shadowing experiment
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
From sensory to memory pathway for dicotic listening shadowing experiment
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.
Early selection suggests that attention operates on the basis of
Physical properties
Default organisation in attention seems to be based
on ear of delivery (channel). Again, attention operates on basis of physical characteristics.
Dicot listening experiment:
Does order matter and how
Ppl can rember the order form one ear to the other, but cannot remember an alternating order (LRLRLRLR)
Early selection bottleneck theory
Rejects all but one message at the beginning (top) of the bottleneck. That one message operates on physical characteristics.
Dicot listening experiment:
- when their name was pit into the unattended ear
Wheat does it mean?
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)
__________ 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?
Cherry (1953)
Evidence was growing for the early selection account of ___________. However, there were also evidence to the contrary. (Semantic and not just physical properties)
Broadbent (1958)
Late selection operates only after
Meaning has been processed
Late selection
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.
Evidence for late selection can be found in the work of ________. This data suggest that selection takes place at the level of meaning!
MacKay (1973)
Intermediate selection
Attention operates on basis of physical characteristics (left, right) or language (words, numbers) or meaning (sense, nonsense)
Intermediate selection pathway
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.
Activating the dictionary unit then is an interaction between the
attended channel and content. Content that has a low threshold [insert your name here] might breakthrough on the unattended channel.
________ argued against an all-or-nothing physical filter and rather for the attenuation of messages that were not the focus of attention.
Treisman (1964)
What determines whether late or early selection takes place
The complexity of our environment, or the degree of our perpetual load
Selective attention is more likely to be late under _______ conditions, and is more likely to be early selection under ________ conditions
low load
high load
_______ has identified a crucial factor in determining whether selective attention takes place- the level of difficulty of the current task.
Lavie (1995)
What low load and high load? What’s the differences ?
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.
Because theres no difference between compatible and incompatible stimuli, therfore under
high perceptual load,, we no longer take into account irrelevant info.
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
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.
EARLY SELECTION
More likely with
high load, difficult task
LATE SELECTION More likely with
low load, easy task
Stroop effect
Saying color of words that its printed in rather then what it spells out
CONGRUENT CONDITION <
NEUTRAL CONDITION <
INCONGRUENT CONDITION
In the stroop effect, there’s a failure of
_________. Why?
selective attention.
The meaning of the word interferes with our a ability to say the color the words printed in.
STIMULUS-DRIVEN CAPTURE
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).
STRATEGIC CAPTURE
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.
Changes in visual attention are largely accompanied by
- OVERT physical shifts in head and eye movement.
- SACCADE movement are replaced by period of FIXATION.
We do not perceive motion during these movements.
Visual attention is guided via
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
Which processing is used for visual attention
Top-down
Pre-cueing experiments can determine the
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
Alerting benefit
[NO – DOUBLE = alerting benefit]
tells you the attentional benefit in knowing WHEN a stimulus is going to arrive
Orienting benefit
CENTER - SPATIAL = orienting benefit]
tells you the attentional benefit in knowing WHERE a stimulus is going to arrive (orienting benefit)
Visual processing seems to benefit from attention being directed to a
single point in space. This is space-based visual attention
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..
Slow
Fast
not only to space, but also to object, same objects will be organize and recognized faster then different objects.
Attention to Auditory objects:
Sounds 1 measured on:
Sound 2 measured on
[PITCH] [WARBLE] [CLIMATE] [DIRECTION]
[SIZE] [GAP] [TILT] [TEXTURE]
Attention to auditory objects:
Principle here:
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.
FEATURE INTEGRATION THEORY
attempts to account for the relative ease (or difficulty) of visual search, and, resolve the binding problem.
According to feature integration theory, how are objects formed?
Objects are formed via attention and the combination of basic visual features such as colour, orientation and shape.
Feature integration theory pathway
Object perception (Leading to illusory conjunction of features and false objects)
The possibility of illusory conjunctions can be increased with damage to the
parietal lobe damage (cf., Balint’s Syndrome).
How does the parietal lobe Take part in this binding issue, the idea where we take
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.
Damage to parietal lobe leads to
Balints syndrome
Divided attention kinds of processes
Controlled and automatic processes
CONTROLLED PROCESSES
- CONSCIOUS CONTROL
- DEMAND EFFORT
- SLOW TO PERFORM
- PERFORMED SERIALLY
Done when beginning practicing a skill
AUTOMATIC PROCESSES
NO CONSCIOUS CONTROL
- DEMAND LESS EFFORT
- FAST TO PERFORM
- PERFORMED IN PARALLEL
Done when skill has been mastered
The success of attention appears to depend on a number of factors:
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
Driving, like bouncing a bat and ball, undergoes a classic transformation from ______ to ______ processing.
controlled to automatic processing
________ identify characteristics of automatic processes including the use of little resource and employment without intention
Schneider & Shiffrin (1977)
When stimuli are in the variable mapping and also part of the
memory set, then they will be recalled, the more trialed, the better the performance.
Elements of our environment cannot be consistently mapped to target relevant or target irrelevant, they move
BETWEEN relevant and irrelevant in a trial-trial basis.
And so performance of variable mapping never gets as efficient as consistent mapping
What contributes to whether a process ends up being automatic or controlled?
the way in which elements are mapped to tasks in the environment.
- Continuously or variably
Consistent mapping allow for
relevance and irrelevance to be maintained over significant periods of time.
Variable mapping
does not allow for such maintenance and so automatic processes cannot kick in.
When we attempt to perform more than one thing at once, this may lead to a
dual-task decrement.
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.
Task A: driving
Task B: mobile phone use
The combination of task A and B is when the decrement in performance occurs.
