Week 5 Flashcards
In the context of cognitive psychology, what is ‘attention’?
The brain’s ability to self-regulate input from the environment
In the context of cognitive psychology, what are the two senses of the word ‘attention’
- Alertness (sustained attention)
2. Selectivity (selective attention)
What is Cherry (1953) known for
The Cocktail Party Problem
How attention is applied selectively in a crowded environment
Who is known for developing the concepts of Dichotic Listening and Shadowing
Cherry
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:
- The message
- Switching to German
- Switching gender
- Reverse speech
- Switch to pure tone
- No memory for unattended message
- Switch from English to German: not noticed
- Switch from male to female: noticed
- Reversed speech: “something queer”
- Switch from voice to 400 cps pure tone: noticed
SUMMARY: physical features perceived, semantic content lost)
What’s a criticism of Cherry’s word on Dichotic Listening and Shadowing
Cherry looked at what was remembered, but we’re really interested in what is perceived… and theoretically things could be perceived and then forgotten
In Dichotic listening and Shadowing, what actually is ‘shadowing’?
Repeating, out loud, the material in the attended channel
What were the two types of cognitive process associated with attention that Neisser (1967) defined in his seminal book Cognitive Psychology?
- Pre-attentive processes (doesn’t require attention to notice things)
- Focal attention (required to extract meaning from stimuli)
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?
Phase difference
What is the main claim of Broadbent in his Filter Theory?
That the extraction of meaning happens AFTER the filter, in what he called the LIMITED CAPACITY CHANNEL
What was the name of the experimental protocol that Broadbent used to test his filter ideas?
(Hint: related to number spans)
Split-Span Experiments
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?
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
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?
‘Filter switches’
That is, the idea that the
What is the colloquial name for the experiment by two Oxford undergraduates, Gary ands Wedderburn (1960), which is credited with taking down filter theory?
The ‘Dear Aunt Jane’ experiment
What was the breakthrough finding of the Dear Aunt Jane experiment?
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
What was the other challenge to filter theory, that came from experiments by Moray (1959)
The finding that if the person’s name is embedded in the unattended channel, they will hear it/be aware of it
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?
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
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?
It needs to be highly salient (e.g. a name) or semantically related (as in Dear Aunt Jane)
What was the experiment that Triesman & Geffen (1967) used to try and demonstrate her ‘early selection’ theory of attention?
The ‘tap’ experiment… participants had to tap something every time they heard the word ‘tap’ on either channel.
What’s the main criticism of Triesman’s ‘early selection’ filter theory
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
WHat’s the central insight of ‘late selection’ filter theory
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
What do early and late selection theorists actually agree on?
they both agree that recognition requires:
a) encoding, and
b) access to long term memory (LTM)
What are the key battlelines in the late and early selection theory debate?
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
What was the experimental data that supports the late selection theory produced by MACKAY (1973)
The river vs bank thingo
What was the experimental data that supports the late selection theory produced by WRIGHT, ANDERSON, STENMAN (1975)
The one using fruit words and the classically conditioned Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)… and electric shocks
