Week 5

Question 1

In the context of cognitive psychology, what is ‘attention’?

Answer 1

The brain’s ability to self-regulate input from the environment

Question 2

In the context of cognitive psychology, what are the two senses of the word ‘attention’

Answer 2

1. Alertness (sustained attention)

2. Selectivity (selective attention)

Question 3

What is Cherry (1953) known for

Answer 3

The Cocktail Party Problem

How attention is applied selectively in a crowded environment

Question 4

Who is known for developing the concepts of Dichotic Listening and Shadowing

Answer 4

Cherry

Question 5

In Cherry’s experiments on Dichotic Listening and Shadowing, what did he find out about the participants’ memory of the unattended channel in relation to:

1. The message
2. Switching to German
3. Switching gender
4. Reverse speech
5. Switch to pure tone

Answer 5

1. No memory for unattended message
2. Switch from English to German: not noticed
3. Switch from male to female: noticed
4. Reversed speech: “something queer”
5. Switch from voice to 400 cps pure tone: noticed

SUMMARY: physical features perceived, semantic content lost)

Question 6

What’s a criticism of Cherry’s word on Dichotic Listening and Shadowing

Answer 6

Cherry looked at what was remembered, but we’re really interested in what is perceived… and theoretically things could be perceived and then forgotten

Question 7

In Dichotic listening and Shadowing, what actually is ‘shadowing’?

Answer 7

Repeating, out loud, the material in the attended channel

Question 8

What were the two types of cognitive process associated with attention that Neisser (1967) defined in his seminal book Cognitive Psychology?

Answer 8

1. Pre-attentive processes (doesn’t require attention to notice things)
2. Focal attention (required to extract meaning from stimuli)

Question 9

When sounds reach your ears, they arrive at slightly different times, thus allowing you to locate the source of the sound in space. What is the name of this difference in arrival time?

Answer 9

Phase difference

Question 10

What is the main claim of Broadbent in his Filter Theory?

Answer 10

That the extraction of meaning happens AFTER the filter, in what he called the LIMITED CAPACITY CHANNEL

Question 11

What was the name of the experimental protocol that Broadbent used to test his filter ideas?

(Hint: related to number spans)

Answer 11

Split-Span Experiments

Question 12

In Broadbent’s Split-Span experiments, where participants heard 3 digits in one ear and 3 in another, what was the preferred order in which participants wanted to recall their dichotic digit stream?

Answer 12

Ear-by-ear recall

As opposed to temporal order.

If they did temporal, their recall dropped to 3-4, basically as if they were impaired

Question 13

According to Broadbent’s filter theory, what’s the cognitive mechanism/thing that explains the fact people can’t recall digits well if they’re made to recall them in temporal order?

Answer 13

‘Filter switches’

That is, the idea that the

Question 14

What is the colloquial name for the experiment by two Oxford undergraduates, Gary ands Wedderburn (1960), which is credited with taking down filter theory?

Answer 14

The ‘Dear Aunt Jane’ experiment

Question 15

What was the breakthrough finding of the Dear Aunt Jane experiment?

Answer 15

That people were able to identify meaningful structures across both ears (ie ‘Dear Aunt Jane’)

Meaning that, against the expectations of filter theory, the content was able to influence how you recall the items

Question 16

What was the other challenge to filter theory, that came from experiments by Moray (1959)

Answer 16

The finding that if the person’s name is embedded in the unattended channel, they will hear it/be aware of it

Question 17

Treisman (1961) is associated with the ‘early filter’ theory of attentional filtering. What was the main difference between her theory and that of Broadbent’s earlier filter theory?

Answer 17

Her’s was an ‘attenuation model’, in that she suggested the filter attenuated the signal from the unattended channel, rather than completely blocking its as per Broadbent.

This means the unattended change still receives partial semantic activation

Question 18

In Triesman’s (1961) ‘early selection’ filter model of attention, what qualities does stimuli need to have in order to make it through the filter and receive semantic activation?

Answer 18

It needs to be highly salient (e.g. a name) or semantically related (as in Dear Aunt Jane)

Question 19

What was the experiment that Triesman & Geffen (1967) used to try and demonstrate her ‘early selection’ theory of attention?

Answer 19

The ‘tap’ experiment… participants had to tap something every time they heard the word ‘tap’ on either channel.

Question 20

What’s the main criticism of Triesman’s ‘early selection’ filter theory

Answer 20

It implies the filter is actually very complex, in that it is able to respond to quite a lot of semantic content, like names, and sequences etc

Needs a very a smart filter… so how would you build something that has access to that much semantic knowledge

Question 21

WHat’s the central insight of ‘late selection’ filter theory

Answer 21

If the filter requires access to this much semantic knowledge, maybe it is further downstream in the processing sequence, coming after some process that has semantic content

Question 22

What do early and late selection theorists actually agree on?

Answer 22

they both agree that recognition requires:

a) encoding, and
b) access to long term memory (LTM)

Question 23

What are the key battlelines in the late and early selection theory debate?

Answer 23

Late selection: All stimuli access LTM, but not in such a way that prompts conscious awareness

Early selection: LTM activate is actually equal to awareness

Question 24

What was the experimental data that supports the late selection theory produced by MACKAY (1973)

Answer 24

The river vs bank thingo

Question 25

What was the experimental data that supports the late selection theory produced by WRIGHT, ANDERSON, STENMAN (1975)

Answer 25

The one using fruit words and the classically conditioned Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)… and electric shocks