Attention

Question 1

define attention

Answer 1

• Ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in our environment.

Question 2

define selective attention

Answer 2

attending to one thing while ignoring others

Question 3

divided attention

Answer 3

paying attention to more than one thing at a time

Question 4

explain dichotic learning

Answer 4

• One message presented in one ear and a different one in the other ear
• Participant asked to focus on one message - are we able to filter out one message (attend to one ear)

Question 5

findings of dichotic learning

Answer 5

• participants cannot report content of unattended ear but can know there was a message and knew the gender of the speaker
• suggests unattended ear is being processed at some level

Question 6

explain the cocktail party effect

Answer 6

not paying attention to information yet still perceiving it - e.g. name in a crowd
- Change in tone
Change in voice

Question 7

Explain Broadbent’s filter model - early selection model

Answer 7

• Sensory memory - holds all incoming info for a fraction of a second and transfers ALL of this to the next stage
• Filter - identifies attended message based on physical characteristics - only attended message is passed onto next stage
• Detector - processes all info to determine higher level characteristics of the message
  Short term memory - receives output of detector

Question 8

explain a limitation of Broadbent’s filter model

Answer 8

• Could not explain cocktail party phenomenon - ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli

Question 9

explain Treisman’s attenuation model

Answer 9

• Attended messages can be separated from unattended messages early in the information-processing systems
• Selection can also occur later
• Attenuator - analyses incoming messages based on physical characteristics and meaning
  Attended message is let through at full strength, unattended message is let through but at a weaker strength
  Dictionary unit - contains words which have different thresholds for being activated - words that are common have low thresholds, uncommon words gave high thresholds

Question 10

what do late selection models suggest

Answer 10

selection does not occur until after meaning has been analysed

Question 11

Outline MacKay (1973)

Answer 11

• In attended ear, participants heard ambiguous sentences. (e.g.: “They were throwing stones at the bank.”). In unattended ear, participants heard either “river” or “money.”
  Participants chose which was closest to the meaning of attended message
  Meaning of the biasing word affected participants’ choice while participants were unaware of the presentation of the biasing words

Question 12

what is processing capacity

Answer 12

how much information a person can handle at any given moment

Question 13

what is perceptual load

Answer 13

the difficulty of a given task

Question 14

explain low load tasks

Answer 14

take up less processing capacity. Task may leave resources available for processing unattended task-irrelevant stimuli

Question 15

explain high load tasks

Answer 15

take up more processing capacity, meaning use all cognitive resources & don’t leave any resources to process unattended task irrelevant stimuli.

Question 16

explain the stroop task

Answer 16

ppts asked to rea colour of word rather than what the word is saying

Question 17

what is training effects

Answer 17

the more often you do a task the better you get at and the more automised the task becomes (takes up less processing capacity)

Question 18

how do we measure overt attention

Answer 18

observed in eye movements using an eye tracker

Question 19

bottom up determinants of eye movements

Answer 19

high salience - some objects more than others
colour and motion highly salient

Question 20

top down determinants of eye movements

Answer 20

scene schemas - scene fixations based on a task

Question 21

how to measure covert attention

Answer 21

Cueing - Procedure for testing memory in which a participant is presented with cues, such as words or phrases, to aid recall of previously experienced stimuli.

Question 22

what is an endogenous cue

Answer 22

directional

Question 23

what is an exogenous cue

Answer 23

location

Question 24

what is divided attention dependent on

Answer 24

difficulty of the task

Question 25

explain Schneider and Shiffrin divided attention task

Answer 25

There is one target stimulus in the memory set (the 3) and four stimuli in each frame.
The target appears in the last frame in this example. Memory set:
one to four characters called target stimuli.
Test frames: could contain random dot patterns, a target, distractors.

Question 26

what did Schneider and Shiffrin conclude

Answer 26

• a point where the task became automatic
• improvement in performance with practice

Question 27

what is inattentional blindness

Answer 27

Stimuli that are not attended to are often not perceived

Question 28

what is change blindness

Answer 28

difficult to detect changes in similar but slightly different scenes

Question 29

what is binding

Answer 29

the process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object.

Question 30

what is the binding problem

Answer 30

The problem of explaining how an object’s individual features become bound together, explained by Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory:

Question 31

what is Treisman’s feature integration theory

Answer 31

Preattentive stage - features analysed automatically
Focused attention stage - attention plays key role - features combined into perceptual object
Illusory conjunction - where features from different objects are inappropriately combined
Mostly bottom up processing