WEEK 3: Attention Flashcards
The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations
Attention
Aspects of Attention
- Selective Attention
- Distraction
- Divided Attention
- Attentional Capture
- Visual scanning
Aspects of Attention
Attending to one thing while ignoring others.
Selective Attention
Aspects of Attention
One stimulus interfering with the processing of another stimuli.
Distraction
Aspects of Attention
Paying attention to more than one thing at a time.
Divided Attention
Aspects of Attention
A rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement.
Attentional Capture
Aspects of Attention
Movements of the eyes from one location or object to another.
Visual scanning
Name the experiment:
1st Part: Focusing the attention on the words in one ear (Attended Ear) and repeat them out loud as you hear them.
2nd Part: notice without shifting your attention from the attended ear what you can take in from the other unattended ear.
Dichotic Listening Experiment
Repeating what you are hearing.
SHADOWING
Dichotic Listening Experiment
_______ (1953) found that although his participants could easily shadow a spoken message presented to the attended ear, and they could report whether the unattended message was spoken by a male or female, they couldn’t report what was being said in the unattended ear.
Cherry
TRUE or FALSE
Dichotic Listening Experiment
Other experiments also show that participants are NOT aware of most of the information being presented to the unattended ear.
TRUE
Broadbent Filter
Model of Attention is also called?
Bottleneck
Model or Early Selection Model
The filter restricts information flow mush as the neck of a bottle restricts the flow of liquid. However, the filter does not slow down the flow on information, it keeps a large portion of the information from getting through.
Broadbent Filter
Model of Attention or Bottleneck
Model or Early Selection Model
________ lets information through based on specific physical characteristics of the information.
The filter eliminates the unattended
information right at the beginning of the flow of information, thus before it is fully analyzed and before it is consciously perceived.
Broadbent filters
This model introduced the use of flow diagrams to cognitive psychology.
Broadbent Filter
Model of Attention or Bottleneck
Model or Early Selection Model
Information passes through the following stages:
- SENSORY MEMORY
- FILTER
- DETECTOR
- OUTPUT
Holds all of the incoming information for a fraction of a second and then transfers all of it to the filter.
SENSORY MEMORY
Identifies the message that is being attended to based on its physical characteristics - life the speaker’s tone of voice, pitch, speed of talking and accent and lets only this attended message pass through to the detector in the next stage. All of the other messages are filtered out.
FILTER
Processes the information from the attended message to determine higher-level characteristics of the message such as it meaning.
Because only the important attended information has been let through the filter, the detector processes all of the information that enters it.
DETECTOR
The detector is sent to short term memory which hold information for 10-15 seconds and also transfers information into long-term memory which can hold information indefinitely.
OUTPUT
TRUE or FALSE
Diagram of Broadbent’s filter model of attention
Messages→Sensory Memory→Filter͢͢ Attended Message→Detector→To memory
TRUE
____________ (1964) proposed modification of Broadbent’s model.
Ann Treisman
Selection occurs in two stages. Ann Treisman replaced Broadbent’s filter with an ___________
ATTENUATOR
analyzes the incoming message in terms of
(1) _______________ - whether it is high pitched or low pitched, fast or slow
(2) its __________ - how the message groups into syllables or works and
(3) its __________
- how sequences of words create meaningful phrases.
- physical characteristics
- language
- meaning
Ann Treisman also believes that relevant information is selected through attention but besides physical characteristics, language and meaning can also be used to separate the messages.
Attenuation
Model of Attention or
Leaky Filter
Model
Analysis of the message proceeds only as far as is necessary to identify the attended message.
Attenuation
Model of Attention or
Leaky Filter
Model
Once the attended and unattended messages have been identified both messages pass through the ____________ but the attended message emerges at full strength while the unattended message are attenuated - they are still present but are weaker than the attended message.
attenuator
The final output of the system is determined in the second stage when the message is analyzed by the _________________
DICTIONARY UNIT
This corresponds to a process and not a brain structure. It contains words or concepts, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated
DICTIONARY UNIT
Proposed that most of the incoming information is processed to the level of meaning before the message is selected for extended analysis and inclusion in decision processes.
Late Selection Model
______________ might have been due to a sift in experimental paradigm.
Experiment now are more complicated.
Late selection models
Early selection can be demonstrated under some conditions and later selection under others depending on the observer’s task and the type of stimuli presented.
Early Late Controversy
Refers to the amount of information people can handle and sets a limit on their ability to process incoming information
PROCESSING CAPACITY
Related to the difficulty of a task
PERCEPTUAL LOAD
_________ tasks use up only a small among of the person’s processing capacity.
Low-load
_________ tasks are tasks that are difficult and not as well practiced and use more of a person’s processing capacity.
High-load
Lavie
Load Theory of Attention
________ tasks that use few cognitive resources may leave resources available for processing unattended task-irrelevant stimuli
Low load
___________ tasks that use all of a person’s cognitive resources don’t leave any resources to process unattended task irrelevant stimuli
High load
Occurs because for incongruent trials the names of the words cause a competing response and therefore slow responding to the target-the color of the ink.
Stroop Effect
The task irrelevant stimuli are extremely powerful because reading words is highly practiced and has become so automatic that it is difficult not to read them.
Stroop Effect
TRUE or FALSE
Stroop Effect
The level of distraction is determined by the perceptual load of the primary task and the power of the distracting stimulus.
TRUE
Spatial Attention:
Overt and Covert
Shifting attention from one place to another by moving the eyes is called ____________
OVERT
ATTENTION
It is visible for an external observer
OVERT
ATTENTION
Shifting attention from one place to another while keeping the eyes stationary is called ______________
COVERT ATTENTION
Each time you briefly paused on one object.
Fixation
When you move your eye to observe another object. A rapid, jerky movement from one fixation to the next.
Saccadic Eye Movement
We usually move our eyes ______ times per second
three
The physical properties of the stimulus such as color, contrast or
movement.
SCANNING based on STIMULUS SALIENCE
Involves analyzing characteristics of the location in the scene and combining these values to create a saliency map of the scene.
SCANNING based on STIMULUS SALIENCE
Observers’ knowledge about want is contained in typical scenes.
SCANNING based on MEANING AND KNOWLEDGE FACTORS.
Persons eye movements were determined primarily by the task. The person fixated on few objects or areas that were irrelevant to the task and eye movements and fixation were closely linked other action the person was about to take.
SCANNING based on TASK DEMANDS
Attention to a location
2 types of cueing:
- Endogenous cues
- Exogenous cues
Always appear in the center of the computer screen and indicate where the participant can expect the subsequent target.
Endogenous cues
Appear at one of the location where the subsequent target could appear (left to right fixation).
Exogenous cues
TRUE or FALSE
Participants react more rapidly to the target when their attention was focused on the location where it was to appear. Information processing is more effective at the place where attention is directed.
TRUE
Practice make it possible for participants to divide their attention to deal simultaneously with all the target and test items.
Divided Attention
A type of processing that occurs without intention and at a cost of none or only some of a person’s cognitive resources.
AUTOMATIC PROCESSING
Ex. Locking the door. Driving while thinking of something else.
AUTOMATIC PROCESSING
_________ attention becomes more difficult when tasks are harder.
Divided
Ex: Distractions while driving
“Looked but failed to see accidents”
Divided Attention
Not attending to something that is clearly visible.
Inattentional Blindness
Difficulty detecting changes in scenes.
CHANGE BLINDNESS
When a cue was added indicating which part of a scene had been changed, participants detected the changes much more quickly.
Inattentional Blindness
In films are spotted by viewers who are looking for them. Usually by viewing the film multiple times.
CONTINUITY ERRORS
The process by which features such as color, form, motion and location are combined to create your perception of a coherent object.
Binding
Integrated perception and binding create a _______________.
coherent perception
Treisman
Feature Integration Theory
Tackles the question how we perceive individual features as part of the same object by proposing a two stage process.
- Preattentive Stage.
- Focused Attention Stage
Feature Integration Theory
Objects are analyzed into separate features. Ex. Seeing a ball, we recognize the both the color and the shape.
Preattentive Stage
Observer’s attention plays an important role in combining the features to crate the perception of whole objects.
Focused Attention Stage
Inability to focus attention on individual objects due to damage in the parietal lobe.
BALINT’S SYNDROME
Emotion Drives Attention
The tendency to prioritize the processing of certain types of stimuli over others. Using search task, emotional stroop task or a dot probe paradigm. Our attention becomes focused on just a few of the options while we ignore the rest
ATTENTIONAL BIAS
TRUE or FALSE
Emotion Drives Attention
Researchers have found that emotional states can influence attentional bias. Anxious individuals tend to exhibit attentional bias early during an information process, while depressed individuals typically show attentional bias when stimuli are presented for a long period of time.
TRUE
