Attention

Question 1

What is dichotic listening and who theorised it?

Answer 1

Cherry 1953: THe idea that if audio is played in both ears there is the ability to ignore one stimulus and only pay attention to the other.

Question 2

What kind of things can filter through dichotic listening?

Answer 2

Information such as someone calling your name.

Question 3

What is Broadbent’s filter model?

Answer 3

Message-> sensory memory -> filter (attended message) -> detector -> to memory.

Question 4

What is sensory memory?

Answer 4

Holds all incoming information.

Question 5

What is the filter?

Answer 5

Identifies the attended messages based on physical characteristics and only allows that message through.

Question 6

What is the detector?

Answer 6

Processes all information from the message to a higher level. Then sends it to be submitted to memory.

Question 7

What is Treisman’s attenuation model?

Answer 7

Messages-> Attenuator->dictionary unit->to memory.

Question 8

What does Treisman’s attenuation model suggest?

Answer 8

Analyses incoming messages in terms of physical characteristics. Attended message let through the attenuator at full strength, unattended is let through at weaker strength.

Question 9

What is Treisman’s threshold theory?

Answer 9

The idea is that each piece of information has a threshold, words that are common or important have low thresholds for being activated, whereas uncommon words have higher.

Question 10

What did Mackay suggest in 1973?

Answer 10

In the attended ear participants heard an ambiguous sentence, whereas in the unattended ear they heard words that gave the sentences meaning. E.g. throwing stones at the bank. Could be a riverbank or money bank.
Found that participants chose the meaning dependant on the word they heard in the unattended ear.

Question 11

What is processing capacity?

Answer 11

How much info a person can handle at a given time.

Question 12

What is perceptual load?

Answer 12

The difficulty of a given task, low loads: less info takes up less capacity tasks may leave resources available for unattended stimuli.
High load: vice versa.

Question 13

Why is the Stroop test easier for children at pre-reading age?

Answer 13

Because they are not authorised to colour and therefore cannot make a strong semantic link to the word they are given.

Question 14

Which type of people have a higher perceptual load threshold?

Answer 14

Video game players and bilingual people.

Question 15

What is measured for attention?

Answer 15

Neural correlates of attention. 2 attention networks of the brain, one of which being the frontoparietal attentional control network.

Question 16

What does the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex regulate?

Answer 16

Regulating attention.

Question 17

What does the posterior parietal cortex regulate?

Answer 17

Paying attention.

Question 18

What does bilateral mean?

Answer 18

They are on both hemispheres.

Question 19

What are saccades?

Answer 19

Rapid movements of the eye.

Question 20

What are fixations and what are they studied with?

Answer 20

Short pauses at points of interest, eye tracker.

Question 21

What is salience?

Answer 21

A feature of a stimulus that makes an individual piece of information more important than the rest. Bottom-up processing, colour and motion are highly salient.

Question 22

What are scene schemas?

Answer 22

Knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes. Top-down processing helps guide fixations from one area to another.

Question 23

What is covert attention?

Answer 23

Attention without eye movement.

Question 24

What is a cueing procedure?

Answer 24

The participant is presented with a cue, such as words or phrases. Donder’s subtraction method is used to find processing time.

Question 25

What is binding?

Answer 25

The process in which multiple components of information combine to form one whole coherent object.

Question 26

What is the binding problem?

Answer 26

That it is difficult to explain a role of a specific component in binding as they all combine to form a whole.

Question 27

What is the feature integration theory (FIT)?

Answer 27

In the preattentive stage the brain analyses the individual features, unconsciously. Then once attention is applied in the focused attention stage the features are bonded in order to produce a perception of the object.

Question 28

What is illusory conjunction?

Answer 28

When features from different objects are inappropriately combined.

Question 29

When does illusory conjunction occur?

Answer 29

When free-floating features combine wrongly due to FIT.

Question 30

What is Balint’s syndrome?

Answer 30

Bilateral parietal lesions, patients fail to focus attention on individual objects and combine features, cannot apprehend all. but one object in the same location, the condition is object-based, not location-based.

Question 31

What is an example of Balint syndrome?

Answer 31

Cannot see a bunch of multicoloured dots as multiple objects, however, if they were all joined by a single line to form one shape it can be processed.

Question 32

What are the features of FIT?

Answer 32

• Mostly bottom-up processing.
• Unconcious
• Top-down processing influences when participants are told the different features they can see as they can seek out the features and break down the image.
• Top-down processing combined with feature analysis allow one to perceive things accurately.