What Is Attention?

Question 1

What is attention?

Answer 1

The mechanism we use to process only what is most relevant or important

Question 2

What is a dichotic listening task?

Answer 2

When participants are played two different messages - to different ears - over headphones and asked to ‘shadow’ (repeat back) one of the messages

Question 3

What wass the result of the dichotic listening task?

Answer 3

• participants noticed somebasic physical characteristics of the unattended channel (e.g. voice vs silence vs pure tone)
• Ps did not notice any of the content of the unattended channel
• Ps did not notice when the language changed from English to German or when the speech changed to backwards speech in the unattended channel
• so some of the baisic physical features of the unattended message are processed but not the higher level semantic properties

Question 4

What’s Broadbents filter theory?

Answer 4

• participant presented with sensory input
• this enters a short term store which holds the information for a while
• this information then goes through a selective filter which selects one message for processing
• after the selective filter we have a limited capacity channel
• the one part of information that went through the filter goes through the limited capacity channel to be processed then a response is carried out.

Question 5

What’s the attentional paradox?

Answer 5

• ‘Cocktail party effect’
• you’re engaged in conversation with your friend
• then you hear your name said by someone else and your whole attention is switched to them
• so how do you notice something you’re not paying attention to? Broadbent’s filter theory can not account for this

Question 6

What’s Bon Wright et al. (1975) fate of unattended information? (Unconscious effect)

Answer 6

• he paired some words with an electric shock
• then conducted a dichotic listening task with those words associated with an electric shock presented in the unattended message
• Ps demonstrated an increased galvanic skin response (GSR - indicative of emotional arousal)
• found that during dichotic listening tasks there was still an increase in arousal for words that were associated with the electric shock in the unattended message
• according to the filter theory tuis shouldn’t have occured
• this suggests that there was some analysis of the content of the unattended message and this affected unconscious physiological measures

Question 7

What’s MacKays fate of unattended information? (Effects on behaviour)

Answer 7

• in the shadowed ear the phrase ‘the man approached the bank’ was played
• in the unattended ear ‘money’ or ‘river’ was played
• the task was to paraphraze the attended message
• despite being unable to recall content Ps who were played ‘money’ in the shadowed ear were more likely to paraphrase it to ‘the man went into the building where the money is kept’ instead of talking about rhe river bank’

Question 8

What’s Treisman’s ‘breakthrough’

Answer 8

That unconsciously words from the unattended channel breakthrough in the dichotic listening task and this is more likely to happen when the word is highly likely given the context

Question 9

What’s Treismans attenuation theory?

Answer 9

• unattended input not completely rejected but filter attentuates (reduces) analysis of unattended signal
• the unattended message still gets through to the filter, just not as strongly as the attended message
• our threshold for processing stimuli which are consistent with the context is lower and this accounts for breakthrough effects
Partially processed stimuli in the unattended message sometimes exceeds the threshold for conscious awareness making it more likely we process task relevant information
• our name is always task relevant
• the theory is a bit circular - more descriptive than explanatory

Question 10

What is Deutsch and Deutsch’s late selection theory?

Answer 10

• suggests filtering occurs late - so that all stimulu are analysed equally and the most relevant stimuli determines the response
• accounts for the extensive processing of stimuli just as well as Triesmans attenuation theory

Question 11

What doesn’t Deutsch and Deutsch’s theory not explain and what is this?

Answer 11

• Triesman and Rileys dichotic listening task.
• they instructed Ps to stop shadowing and tap whenever they heard a word in either message. According to Deutsch and Deutschs theory we would have expected an equal number of stimuli to have been detected in either cannel but more target words were detected in the attended ear

Question 12

What’s Lavie’s (1995, 2000) perceptual load theory?

Answer 12

• everyone has limited attentional capacity
• total available capacity is always located
• spare capacity that is not required for primary task is automatically allocated to irrelevent stimuli
• attentional capacity allocated to main task depends on perceptual load

Question 13

What is perceptual load?

Answer 13

Number of units and the display and the nature of processing required for each unit. High perceptual load means high difficulty and vice versa

Question 14

In experiment where Ps is asked to say whether there is an X or N on a card with a distractor on it what happens according to the perceptual load theory?

Answer 14

There will be less interference from the distractor on the more difficult task relative to the easier task (because there is less attentional resource left over for processing it.

Question 15

What are the findings in the experiment where Ps are asked to say whether there is an X or N on a card with a distractor on it?

Answer 15

• If the perceptual load is high the distractor made no difference to response time
• if perceptual load is low: the more incompatible the distractor the longer the response time
• So stage of selection is variable and task-irrelevant information can be processed if there is spare capacity.

Question 16

What does the likelihood of noticing an unexpected event depend on?

Answer 16

• difficulty of primary task

- similarity to attended event

Question 17

What may we selectively attend to?

Answer 17

• An area or location or region of space (location- based attention/ spatial attention
• A given object or objects (object-based attention)
• either or both of these things

Question 18

What is the ‘attentional spotlight’?

Answer 18

A mental spotlight for visual attention

Question 19

What is ‘covert attention’ and who suggested it?

Answer 19

Posner (1980) suggested that the attentional spotlight can shift to a different visual location without eye movements

Question 20

How do we control the attentional spotlight according to Posner and Petersen (1990)?

Answer 20

• Disengagement of attention from a given visual stimulus
• Shifting of attention from one target stimulus to another
• engaging or locking attention on a new visual stimulus

Question 21

What is Posner’s exogenous attentional cueing paradigm and what are the findings?

Answer 21

• he set up an experiment where you are sat at a computer and a target star either appears in a box on the left or the right of the screen and you have to tap which side it appears in. Other things may appear on the screen to direct or misdirect your attention
• valid trial: the cue directed you attention to the side of the star
• neutral cue: the cue is directed in the middle
• invalid trial - the cue is directed at the opposite side of the screen from the star
• found that the response time is quickest for valid cues and slowest for invalid cues. This is called exogenous cueing.

Question 22

What was Posners endogenous attentional cueing experiment?

Answer 22

Instructions: ‘look at the cross in the centre, if it turns red the stimulus is more likely to appear on the right, if it turns green the stimulus is more likely to appear on the left’

Question 23

What are the features of the exogenous system?

Answer 23

• automatically shifts attention
• involved when uninformative peripheral cues are presented
• stimuli that are salient or that differ from other stimuli are most likely to be attended

Question 24

Give features of the Endogenous system

Answer 24

• controlled by the individual’s intentions and expectations

- involved when central cues are presented

Question 25

What is misdirection?

Answer 25

A form of deception in which the attention of the audience is focused on one thing in order to distract from another

Question 26

What is the zoom lens theory?

Answer 26

Area of focal attention can be increased or decreased based on task demands

Question 27

What is LaBerge’s (1983) evidence for zoom lens model?

Answer 27

• Instructions: detect the presence of the letter R as quickly as possible on the screen, but it will be preceded by a cue and in that cue yo should look out for the letter S somewhere. The experiment was then amended so that the cue would be a word
• Faster reaction time when probe (letter S) within central beam that Ps attention was focussed on
• In word task Ps required to categorise entire word = broader attentional beam
• the distance of target from the centre did not affect reaction time following word probe
• faster reaction time for word probe
• suggests we can change the size of our attentional spotlight to have a bigger or narrower attention

Question 28

What is Awh & Pashler’s (2000) multiple spotlights experiment?

Answer 28

• Ps asked to report 2 numbers in a 5x5 grid filled with 23 letters
• Cued (80%) valid to two squares
• On validly cued trials Ps scored about 90% accurately
• For the invalidly cued trials (20%) when they are cued far from the number the performance is under 20%
• For the invalidly cued trials when they are cued near to the numbers the accuracy is much poorer than the valid cues.
• according to the zoom lens prediction the performance should have been just as good because the attention span should cover the area with the number if you are cued near it
• suggests we have two attentional spotlights

Question 29

How is focused attention studied?

Answer 29

by presenting individuals with two or more stimulus inputs at the same time and instructing them to only respond to one

Question 30

How is divided attention studied?

Answer 30

By presenting at least two stimulus inputs at the same time and instructing them to respond and attend to all stimulus inputs (also known as multitasking)

Question 31

What does external attention refer to?

Answer 31

‘selection and modulation of sensory information’

Question 32

What does internal attention refer to?

Answer 32

‘selection, modulation, and maintenance of internally generated information such as task rules, responses, long term memory or working memory

Question 33

Why is auditory segmentation often harder than visual segmentation?

Answer 33

Because there is considerable overlap of signals from different sounds sources in the cochlea, whereas visual objects tend to occupy different regions of the retina. Also each sound source adds to the signal reaching the ears. In contrast nearer objects tend to block out further ones with visual signals reaching the retina.

Question 34

What is feature based attention?

Answer 34

when for example you look for a feature of your friend in a crowd

Question 35

What are the findings in object-based/ space-based research?

Answer 35

• object based attention is much more common in everyday life than space based-attention
• visual attention can involve a combination of space-based, object-based and feature-based processes
• The relative importance of object-based and space-based attention is flexible