W3

Question 1

What is inattentional blindness?

Answer 1

Inattentional blindness is when we overestimate how much of the world we are actually aware of, demonstrated by studies like the gorilla study where participants didn’t notice a gorilla when focused on another aspect of a video.

Question 2

What is Central Capacity Theory?

Answer 2

Central Capacity Theory proposes a single central capacity, such as the central executive or attention, with strictly limited resources, shared between competing tasks, leading to dual task costs when tasks exceed the total available resource.

Question 3

What is attentional blink?

Answer 3

Attentional blink refers to the phenomenon where we can make something invisible by showing it very quickly after showing something else that is important to the observer.

Question 4

What is the Cocktail Party Problem?

Answer 4

The Cocktail Party Problem refers to the difficulty in focusing attention on one auditory stream in the presence of other competing auditory streams, illustrated by dichotic listening tasks.
easier to attend to familiar or physically different voices

Question 5

What was Broadbent’s filter theory (attention as early selection)?

Answer 5

Broadbent’s filter theory suggests that inputs undergo parallel processing in the sensory register, then are filtered based on physical characteristics to prevent overloading of limited capacity mechanisms.

Question 6

Issues with Broadbent’s theory?

Answer 6

Issues with Broadbent’s theory include the observation that at least some parts of the unattended stream are processed semantically, as evidenced by instances like hearing your name within a conversation you’re not paying attention to. Additionally, stimuli that individuals don’t report experiencing can still influence their behavior, such as in cases of blindsight.

Question 7

What is Deutsch and Deutsch’s theory (Attention as late selection)?

Answer 7

Deutsch and Deutsch’s theory proposes that all stimuli are fully analyzed, and the bottleneck occurs late, before the response, with the most relevant stimulus determining the response.

Question 8

What are issues with Deutsch and Deutsch’s theory?

Answer 8

Issues with Deutsch and Deutsch’s theory include evidence from early sensory event-related potentials (~100ms post-stimulus) showing smaller responses if stimuli are unattended, suggesting that the bottleneck occurs earlier during processing. Additionally, results from such findings tend to favor Treisman’s perspective.

Question 9

What is Treisman’s attenuation theory (Attention as flexible selection)?

Answer 9

Treisman’s attenuation theory suggests that unattended information is attenuated after the sensory register, with stimulus analysis proceeding through a hierarchy from physical characteristics to meaning.

Question 10

What are Posner’s 2 Attentional systems?

Answer 10

Posner proposed two attentional systems: endogenous (top-down) controlled by individual intentions and expectations, and exogenous (bottom-up) automatically shifting attention to salient stimuli.

Question 11

What is the visual search paradigm; Feature Search?

Answer 11

In feature search, the target has a unique feature that pops out, making it easy to find among distractors that lack that feature.

Question 12

What is the visual search paradigm; Conjunction Search?

Answer 12

In conjunction search, the target lacks a unique feature, making visual search more difficult as attention is required to bind multiple features together to identify the target.

Question 13

What is feature integration theory?

Answer 13

Feature integration theory suggests that perceptual features are encoded in parallel and prior to attention, with attention needed to bind features into objects, explaining feature search and conjunction search phenomena.

Question 14

According to FIT what are the stages of visual search?

Answer 14

A rapid initial parallel process to identify features, which is attention-independent.
Next, a slow serial process to form objects by combining features, where focused visual attention binds the features into an object. Feature combination can be influenced by prior knowledge (e.g., bananas are yellow).

Question 15

What are “illusory conjunctions” according to FIT?

Answer 15

“Illusory conjunctions” occur when features of different objects are incorrectly combined in the absence of focused attention, leading to the perception of a single object with a combination of features.

Question 16

What is necessary for “illusory conjunctions” to occur, according to FIT?

Answer 16

“Illusory conjunctions” occur when focused attention is absent, relevant stored knowledge is absent, spatial attention is diverted, or the display is presented in peripheral vision, and they can occur with high confidence.

Question 17

What evidence is there against FIT?

Answer 17

Evidence against Feature Integration Theory (FIT) includes findings from negative priming tasks (e.g., Tipper, 1985), which show semantic (meaning) processing of unattended stimuli, contradicting FIT’s argument that an object is only an object if attended to. Additionally, FIT struggles to explain inhibition due to the similarity of distractors or the semantic connection of distractors.

Question 18

What is the Guided Search Theory/Dual Path Model?

Answer 18

suggests that in real-world search tasks, people typically have expectations of where to find certain things, and prior knowledge can make search more efficient. Unlike Feature Integration Theory (FIT), which posits a transition from parallel to serial processing, the Dual Path Model proposes a simultaneous mix of serial and parallel strategies for visual search. Early pre-attentive processes generate an activation map, where each item in the display has its own level of activation based on its “promise,” and objects with the highest activation receive attention first. This model combines both top-down and bottom-up processing for efficient search.