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
Selection via priming
- Expectations of what the stimulus will be pre-activates neurons
- Prime your own visual system - sometimes by activating detectors (so they’re more easily triggered, and hence more sensitive), and sometimes by biasing detectors (so that they’re more likely to respond to the desired input)
Perception and priming
- Perception is facilitated by the priming of relevant detectors
- In the absence of priming, perception may not happen at all
- Priming is sometimes stimulus driven - that is, produced by the stimuli recently or frequently encountered = repetition priming
Target experiment
If the target appeared in the expected location, participants detected it a bit more quickly. If, however, participants were misled about the target’s position (so that the target appeared in an unexpected location), their responses were slower than when the participants had no expectations at all.
Posner and Snyder 1975 Experiment
- repetition and expectation priming
- Start with a neutral fixation point or a fixation point similar to the stimuli or a misleading fixation point
- Show two stimuli and ask patient to say if they’re the same
Result
- Slower if they are mislead by the warning signal
Due to priming
- those in the low validity will not be primed and therefore won’t have the benefits or costs of priming
Priming costs for other detectors
- Cost; priming the wrong detectors takes something away from the other detectors
Increase in allotment = decrease elsewhere, limited “budget”
- “Limited capacity system” and effort of mental resources
Attention spotlight
- Like a spotlight beam of your attention shifting (not of eye movement)
Control system:
- Orienting system (shift attention) then alerting system (keep brain alert) then executive system (voluntary actions)
Attention spotlight - what determines where it’s focused
- Where we shine the beam depends on the looker’s goals, culture, gender
Individualistic cultures focus on individual things rather than their connection to one another (which they would do in collectivist)
- Don’t really focus on elements we see as predictable, or that are unexpected (ex. Pink stapler in a forest)/rare
Unilateral neglect syndrome
- Stop paying attention to one side of space
- Always acquired
- Usually due to a stroke
Do spatial boundaries or object boundaries prevail?
- Like the spotlight or the object within it
In unilateral neglect syndrome, it’s the spotlight which is the spatial boundary (where the person draws all the letters on one half of the clock, or reads “carrot” as “rot”)
When thing from right moves to left side they still focus on that instead part (even though it switched sides), first spatial, then object’s boundaries
Feature blinding - pro limited attention capacity
- Sometimes attention’s limited capacity is good so you can find specific things within broad groups (ex. multi-feature searches)
- Then you won’t be confused about what to attend to
Feature integration theory
- Attention glues together elements and features that are in view
- Helps solve the binding problem
Divided attention / multitasking
- Sometimes easy (walking while talking) - require separate resources so they won’t interfere
- Sometimes hard (do homework while listening to a lecture from the same class) - require similar resources so they’ll compete
- You can do multiple tasks if you have the resources needed for both
Bigger difference = easier to do both tasks
Executive control
- Mechanisms that allow you to control your own thoughts
- Makes sure your next steps are organized in the right sequence, lets you change strategy easily
- Can only handle one task at a time
Perseveration errors
Tendency to produce the same response over and over even when it’s plain that the task requires a change in the response (due to brain damage)
Goal neglect
Failing to organize their behaviour in a way that moves them toward their goals (ex. two Vs instead of / \ for diagonal sections)
Effect of practice
Diminishes resource demand as tasks become automatic
- With practice, a divided attention task can become a single organized task
- Turning effortful, serial processing into parallel, automatic processing
Or at least skilled performance
Practice effect pros and cons
- Frees up resources but you lose control of your performance
Stroop task
If high consistency between colours and word, task becomes automatic
Stroop interference
- Colour written is different than the colour it’s written in
Task _ vs task _ resources
There are task-general and task-specific resources
Evidence for task-specific resources
Shadow words presented to one ear while simultaneously memorizing:
- Words presented to the other ear (very difficult)
- Words presented visually (easier)
- Picture presented visually (easiest)
not all hard because we have task-specific resources that don’t overlap when the tasks are very different
Evidence for task-general resources
- Even when tasks are very different, increasing the resource requirements of one task past some critical point will reduce the efficiency of performance on one or both tasks
Suggests resource limitation that is general to the two tasks, even though they are very different in nature
Lee Brooks experiment
Perform verbal task requiring verbal or spatial responses
Perform spatial task requiring verbal or spatial responses
- If SPECIFIC, tasks should interfere only if they use the SAME set of resources
- If GENERAL, all tasks should interfere
→ Pro-SPECIFIC Verbal responses interfere with verbal analysis but not really with spatial analysis (same for spatial)
→ Pro-GENERAL There is a limit to our performance in response to high demands of any two tasks, regardless of their similarity
Dual task performance
Nearly always worse at trying to perform two tasks at once than one at a time
Macro level → we’re always doing dual performance in our lives
Micro level → when we can do two things at the exact same time
Repetition priming vs expectation priming
Repetition priming - warming up one
detector doesn’t have any effect on
another detector
priming helps, misleading no effect
Expectation based priming
- also produces a benefit when you get what you expect
- BUT also a cost if you don’t get what you
expect
