Lecture 5 - Attention 1. Historical Origins

Question 1

What are the two types of attention we discussed in lecture?

Answer 1

1. Sustained Attention - Alertness.
2. Selective Attention.

Question 2

What are the limitations of Selective Attention?

Answer 2

We have a limited capacity to the number of stimuli we can attend to.
A biological adaptation to us being a limited capacity system is the ability to selectively attend to certain stimuli, however, we do this at the expense of other stimuli.

Question 3

What is the Cocktail Party Problem, and why is it an example often used in Attention Research (Cherry, 1953). What was Cherry interested in in this thought problem?

Answer 3

Cherry wanted to know how we can attend to certain stimuli and tune out other channels of stimuli.

Question 4

According to Cherry (1953) what are Dichotic Listening and Shadowing?

Answer 4

Shadowing is repeating a message that one hears in an experimental condition looking at attention.

Question 5

According to Cherry’s 1953 experiment, what changes to unattended message did people remember?

Answer 5

Female voice (From male voice).
Reversed speech.
Pure tone.

Question 6

What did Neisser (1967) infer from Cherry’s experiment?

Answer 6

Preattentive processes vs. focal attention.

Question 7

Does somantic meaning of language require focal attention?

Answer 7

Yes.

Question 8

According to Cherry 1953, what is Binaural Presentation and what experiment did he do using this and what were the findings?

Question 9

What are some of the criticisms of Cherry’s theory of selective attention?

Answer 9

Confounded perception and memory. Cherry focused on what was remembered, but was more interested in what was perceived.
The stimuli may have been perceived and then forgotten.

Question 10

Who proposed Filter Theory?

Answer 10

Broadbent (!958).

Question 11

What does Short Term Store refer to in Broadbent’s Filter Theory?

Question 12

What were the Split - Span Experiments done by Broadbent to test Filter Theory?

Question 13

What was considered the Failure of the Filter Theory?

Answer 13

Dear Aunt Jane experiment by Gray and Wedderburn (1960).

Question 14

What was Moray’s 1959 experiment? And what how did it challenge Cherry’s and Broadbent’s theories of attention?

Question 15

What is the Early vs. Late Selection Debate?

Answer 15

Treisman (1961) and Deutsch and Deutsch (1963), and Norman (1968).
Debate about when Semantic Analysis occurred - before or after we filter out the stimuli we are not attending to.

Question 16

What was Treisman’s (1961) model of Attention?

Answer 16

Attenuation Model.
This theory was similar to Broadbent’s theory, however, instead of excluding unattended information we attenuate/”turn down” the unattended information.

Question 17

What experiment was done by Treisman & Geffen (1967) and how did this provide support for Treisman’s theory?

Question 18

What were some criticisms of Treisman’s theory of Early Selection?

Question 19

What was Norman’s 1968 theory of attention (hint: it was a Late Selection Model).

Question 20

What is some of the evidence that was put forth for the Late Selection Theory?

Question 21

What experiment was done by Von Wright, Anderson & Stenman (1975)? And, what did the findings of this experiment mean for the Late Selection Theory of Attention?

Question 22

Is human attention a limited capacity system?

Answer 22

Yes.

Question 23

Who proposed the “Cocktail Party Problem” in 1953 to use as an example of how we are able to selectively attend to certain stimuli?

Answer 23

Cherry.

Question 24

What was the experiment that Cherry used to study the Cocktail Problem in the lab?

Answer 24

DICHOTIC LISTENING AND SHADOWING.
This involved participants wearing headphones and hearing two channels of speech in each ear.
Participants are asked to attend to and “shadow” one of the channels.
Shadowing just refers to repeating the message they are hearing as they hear it.
Cherry was interested in what happened to the information on the unattended channel.

Question 25

In Cherry’s dichotic listening and shadowing task, what happened to the message on the unattended channel? I.e. to what extent could participants remember the message on the unattended channel?
1. When the message was just another english male voice?
2. When the message was in german?
3. When the message was a single tone?
4. When the message changed from a male to female voice?
5. When the speech was reversed?

Answer 25

1. No memory of the unattended channel.
2. Did not notice that the message was in german.
3. Noticed that it was a tone.
4. Noticed switch from male to female.
5. Noticed something queer when speech was reversed.

Conclusion, only features of the audio are noticed. The semantics or meaning of the messages are not processed.

Question 26

Neisser (1967) proposed this idea that we have two ways of processing information and depending on how we process information our memory of this information will change.
The two forms of processing are?

Answer 26

PREATTENTIVE PROCESSES AND FOCAL ATTENTION.
All informtion/stimuli are processed preattentively, however, we need to actively focus on certain stimuli (focal attention) to understand meaning and form memory ??

Question 27

In Cherry’s Binaural Presentation study that had participants receiving two different messages in the same voice to both ears, what did he conclude about how we are able to selectively attend to messages in a cocktail setting?

Answer 27

Participants found this experiment almost impossible. That is, they were unable to shadow one of the messages.
Cherry interpreted this information as saying that what allows us to selectively attend to a certain message is the ability to detect the differences in phase of sound waves and in turn isolate different messages as they are coming from different locations and therefore have different phases and amplitudes of sound waves.

Question 28

What is one of the main criticisms of Cherry’s work?

Answer 28

Cherry was interested in what people PERCEIVED, however, he was measuring what people REMEMBERED.
We may perceive and not remember.

Question 29

Who proposed FILTER THEORY in 1958?

Answer 29

Donald Broadbent - first theory of cognitive attention.
Stimuli information goes from:
1. Senses
2. Short term store
3. Selective Filter
4. Limited Capacity filter (p system)

Question 30

In Broadbent’s Filter Theory, where is meaning extracted?

Answer 30

In the limited capacity channel.

Question 31

In Broadbent’s Filter Theory, what determines what gets into the Limited Capacity Channel.

Answer 31

The Selective Filter.

Question 32

What was an example of Broadbent’s Filter Theory using a split-span experiment?

Answer 32

The Split-Span experiment involved presenting participants with two sequences of numbers (different) to each ear at the same time (although each number appeared sequentially).
When asked the temporal sequence of the numbers the participants were not very good.
However, when asked the repeat each sequence of numbers from one ear and then the other they were much better.
Broadbent suggested that was going on here was that when the participants need to report the temporal sequence of the numbers the filter system would need to continue to switch between the memory trace from each hemisphere or ear. This takes time and the trace would decay faster than the time it took to switch between each ear enough times to report the temporal sequence.
On the other hand, the filter only needs to switch once when the participants are asked to recall the sequence of numbers from one ear at a time.
Broadbent took this data to be evidence of the filter theory.

Question 33

What is the Dear Aunt Jane (1960) experiment and how did it contradict Filter Theory?

Answer 33

Performed by undergraduate students this experiment looked at Broadbent’s split-span experiment, but instead of just numbers they used numbers and a phrase, such as “dear aunt jane”.
The words in the phrase and the sequence of numbers were presented across both eats.
Participants preferred to and were able to repeat the phrase and the sequence of numbers eventhough these messages were presented across both ears.
This was completely different to Broadbent’s work and shed some criticism on Filter Theory.

Question 34

In Moray’s 1959 experiment looking at dichotic listening and shadowing, what did he find when the participant’s name was inserted into the message on the unattended channel?

Answer 34

Participants were able to recognise and remember that their name was said.
This was seen as further evidence that Broadbent’s Filter Theory needed some amendments or needed to be discarded.

Question 35

What does the Early vs. Late Selection debate refer to?

Answer 35

The debate between where in the cognitive process sequence of attention does the filter occur that allows us to selectively attend to certain stimuli.

Question 36

Does Broadbent’s filter or Treismann’s filter completely block the unattended material?

Answer 36

Broadbent’s filter.
Treismann’s filter attentuates, but does not completely ignore, the unattended channel/stimuli.

Question 37

What kind of stimuli are more salient and biases the filter to allow it to get through the filter according to Treismann’s Attenuation Theory?

Answer 37

Treisman suggests that Broadbent’s theory is correct, but just requires an ammendment that states that the unattended information is not completely blocked by the filter, but rather it is attenuated and so the semantic trace it leaves in working and long term memory is less than that of the attentuated stimuli.
Treisman also suggests that the filter is subject to being more biased toward letting information that is semantically related, or well know (such as one’s own name). She uses this amended theory to explain what was seen in both the Moray experiment and Dear Aunt Jane.

Question 38

What was the experiment done by Treisman and Geffen (1967) to provide evidence for the Attenuated Theory of Selective Attention?

Answer 38

The experiment was a Cherry-like dichotic listening task where the participant was presented with two messages, one in each ear and asked to shadow one of the channels only.
They were also asked to tap whenever they heard the word “tap” in either of the channels.
What they found was that participants correctly tapped more often for the attended message, but also tapped (albeit less) when the tap was on the unattended channel.
This was taken as evidence that the filter attenuates the unattended stimuli.

Question 39

What is one of the main criticisms of Early Selection theories, such as Treismann’s Attenuated Theory?

Answer 39

That the filter must be quite complex to be able to attenuate information depending on the type of information it is receiving.

Question 40

Who were the initial proponents of Late Selection Filter Theories of Selective Attention?

Answer 40

Deutsch and Deutsch (1963).
Norman (1968).

Question 41

What do Late Selection Theories say about how we process information and selectively attend to certain information?

Answer 41

Late selection theories have the same steps as early selection theories, however, they state that after we have perceptually processed information it is them sematically processed (i.e. makes contact with LTM stores) and THEN it goes through a filter before we are aware of the information we attending to.

Question 42

In Late Selection Theory, are we aware of all the information we semantically analyse?

Answer 42

No.

Question 43

In Late Selection (Norman, 1968), there is a bottom-up input and a top-down inputs that influence the filter in terms of what we will be allowed into awareness.
What are these?

Answer 43

Bottom-up influence comes from stimulus analysis or stimulus perception.
Top-down influence comes from expectations or pertinence, i.e. what is relevant to us right now.
These two factors influence what stimulus information the filter will then allow into conscious awareness.

Question 44

McKay (1973), did an experiment to test whether Late Selection was occurring.
When did the participants falsely recognise that they had shadowed a certain sentence that they had not, and how was this evidence for the late selection theory?

Answer 44

The attended channel had a sentence that had an ambigous word such as “bank”.
The unattended channel had a word that related to “bank”, such as river or money.
When asked if they had shadowed a certain sentence in prior trials, participants were more likely to falsey recognise a sentence that solved the ambiguity in the direction of the word on the unattended channel. e.g. “….bank of the river” if river had been presented on the unattended channel.
They had no memory of hearing the word river or money, but there had evidently been some form of semantic processing occuring when they were presented with that sitmulus.
Hence, this was evidence FOR the Late Selection Theory of Attention.

Question 45

In an experiment that looked at classically conditioned galvanic skin responses (GSR) to “banana” and other fruit, what was found when a fruit not in the conditioning phase, such as “peach”, was presented in the unattended channel in a dichotic listening task?
And, what did this mean for Late Selection theorists?

Answer 45

It was found that when peach was presented in the unattended channel a GSR was measured.
This was interpreted as the participants having semantically processed the word, but as they were not attending to that channel, it had not made it through the filter, because they had no memory of it.