W2: Attention Flashcards
In dichotic listening tasks, most participants are able to do what?
Identify physical attributes of the message on the unattended channel.
Participants are instructed to fixate on a point on a computer screen but to attend to, and report on, a “+” sign that appears off to one side for 180 ms. After several trials, the fixation point is unexpectedly replaced by a new shape, but the participants do not notice this change. This is a study of what?
Inattentional blindness
Participants are shown a pair of similar pictures separated by a blank interval. The pictures are identical except for a single aspect (e.g., a man is wearing a hat in one scene but not in the other). In these kinds of tasks, participants often find it hard to detect the change. This phenomenon is known as what?
Change blindness
Electrical activity in the brain in the interval just after the presentation of a stimulus shows that the neurons are…
More responsive to attended inputs than unattended inputs.
What is true of cost and benefits?
The cost for expectation-based priming is higher than the cost for repetition priming.
Posner, Snyder, and Davidson (1980) examined spatial attention using arrows as primes. In most of the trials the arrow pointed to the area where the stimulus would appear a moment later, but 20% of the time it did not. They compared reaction times (RTs) for trials when the cue correctly pointed to the stimulus location, for trials when the arrow pointed toward an incorrect position, and for trials with a neutral cue (no arrow). Which of the following statements was NOT supported by their findings?
We can attend to two different locations without a reduction in performance.
Movements of attention are…
faster than eye movements
In a study examining the effect of culture on what people pay attention to in a scene.
American participants spent more time looking at the central figure than Japanese participants.
A patient has suffered brain damage and, as a result, now seems to ignore all information on the left side of her world. If shown words, she reads only the right half of the word; if asked to copy a picture, she copies only the right half. What is the patient suffering from?
Unilateral neglect syndrome
What is relevant with “cognitive budget”?
One can perform multiple tasks only if the sum of the tasks’ demands does not exceed the budget.
- The budget contains task-specific and task-general resources.
- Tasks may require fewer resources after practice.
Executive control is likely engaged when a person?
- takes steps to avoid a habitual response.
- chooses to focus on a specific task and avoid distractions.
- needs to shift strategy, because the current efforts aren’t working as hoped.
The reason that a novice driver will find it more difficult to drive a car and talk on a mobile phone simultaneously compared to a skilled driver is because?
The tasks interfere with each other, but skilled drivers have less need for executive control.
Downside of practice
Task performance can go ahead with no executive control, so it’s essentially not controlled (whether you like it or not).
What can happen without executive control?
PRESERVATION ERROR: The tendency to produce the same response over and over, even if it’s plain that the task requires a change in its response.
GOAL NEGLECT: failing to organise behaviour in a way that advances towards a goal.
Preservation error
Can occur when there is no executive control.
Describes the tendency to produce the same response over and over, even if it’s plain that the task requires a change in its response. A tendency to produce the same response over and over even when it’s plain that the task requires a change in the response.
