Week 4 Flashcards
Selective attention
- William James
- Withdraw attention from some things to focus on others effectively
Dichotic listening
- When shadowing the attended channel people can’t even tell if the unattended channel or unattended voice is nonsense or not
- Can’t remember the unattended info
- Can tell low level perceptual info such as human or not, female or male, etc.
Shadowing task
- One ear with stuff you have to repeat (shadow) and stuff in your other ear you’re supposed to ignore
Cocktail party effect
- If you include salient info or info with personal significance some is remembered
(Ex. your name, recently watched movie) - Tells us early selection model can’t be right because some information gets through
Broadbent → early selection
- Bottleneck during or before perceptual analysis
- Filter early sensory info based on physical characteristics
Treisman → attenuation theory
- Filtering based on physical properties
- Unattended info is weakened but not fully blocked
Deutch & Deutch → late filter
- All sensory/perceptual info goes through but you consider their importance and completely forget the unimportant stuff
McKay priming
- Priming example: recall meaning of shadowed sentences is biased by unattended words
Ex. money or river / they threw stones towards the bank yesterday
Your name
- Either has a very high resting activation level
- Or a very low threshold (bucket analogy)
Directed vs captured attention
Directed
- You’re in control
- Endogenous (comes from within)
- “Controlled”
- Top-down and conceptual (primarily)
Captured
- Exogenous
- “Automatic”
- Bottom-up and data-driven
- Things seize your attention whether you like it or not (ex. Moral or emotional overtones, advertisements, warning sounds)
→ explains why things go viral
Inattentional blindness
- Look at dot but pay attention to x, people didn’t notice changes to dot unless given warning
- Looking for something in fridge but don’t notice you’re staring right at it due to other thoughts occupying you mind
- Also inattentional deafness and numbness
Change blindness
- Can’t detect changes in scenes they’re looking directly at (like what we did in class)
- Also door example from class
Distracted driving study
- No disruption when listening to radio or audiobooks or even performing a shadowing task while holding the phone
- Big disruption when generating words or unconstrained conversations (handheld AND hands-free)
Hands-free or dual-tasking not the issue
ATTENTION is the issue
Early vs late selection
- Early selection hypothesis, unattended info is attenuated from the start = never perceived
- Late selection hypothesis, all info gets analysis then selection occurs after
Biased competition theory
Neuron temporarily biased to specific properties to help it ignore distractors