Attention

Question 1

What is selective attention?

Answer 1

Attending to only one source of information that is relevant to our goals while ignoring other sources.

Question 2

What is sustained attention/maintaining vigilance?

Answer 2

To direct cognitive activity on a specific task or thought for a longer period of time, in order to complete it and stay on track toward a goal.

Question 3

What is selection for?

Answer 3

The human mind is severely limited in processing concurrent information at a conscious level of awareness.

Only a small subset of available information is granted access to the brain processes.

Question 4

What is attention?

Answer 4

A cognitive mechanism that helps to select and process important or interesting information while irrelevant information is largely ignored.

It is based on the goals, tasks and relevance of the situation.

Question 5

What is bottom-up attention?

Answer 5

Operates on sensory input by rapidly and involuntarily directing attention to salient visual features of potential importance.

Question 6

What is top-down attention?

Answer 6

Our relevant behavioural goals impacts where attention is focussed.

Question 7

What are the three functions of attention?

Answer 7

• Attention for readiness.
• Attention for selection.
• Attention for detection.

Question 8

What is attention for readiness?

Answer 8

Attention determines the degree of readiness for specific events that we expect to happen.

Question 9

What is vigilance?

Answer 9

The ability to sustain alertness to detect rare events.

Question 10

What is divided attention?

Answer 10

The ability to simultaneously allocate attention to two or more sources of information or tasks.

Question 11

Is it possible to perform different actions simultaneously?

Answer 11

Yes, if the actions involve different sensory systems/sensory modalities.

However, simultaneously attending to stimuli using the same resources can lead to error and decreased efficiency.

Question 12

What is vigilance decrement?

Answer 12

Decline in the ability to remain alert for important signals over time, as indicated by reduced performance.
- Affected by ageing, drugs, lack of sleep.

Question 13

What factors affect the performance of two tasks at the same time?

Answer 13

• Overall task similarity.
• Similar stimulus modality.
• Similar response modality.

Question 14

What is serial processing?

Answer 14

Switching attention backwards and forwards between two tasks.

(one at a time)

Question 15

What is parallel processing?

Answer 15

Involves attending to, and processing, two or more tasks at the same time.

Question 16

What is the multiple-resource model?

Answer 16

• Multiple attentional resources exist and in some cases are seperate from each other.
• Different attentional tasks can be performed at the same time without interference.

Tasks requiring different resources are performed together more successfully than those requiring the same resources.

Question 17

What are the limitations of the multiple-resource model?

Answer 17

• De-emphasises high-level coordination and organisational processes involved in dual-task performance.
• The sequence of processing stages is too rigid: In real life much dual-task processing is flexible and influenced by the individual’s strategies.
• Numerous forms of cognitive processing can occur between perception and responding - but have not been discussed in detail.

Question 18

What is focused/selective attention?

Answer 18

Attending to only one source of information while ignoring other competing sources.

Question 19

What is the Dichotic listening technique for investigating selective attention (Cherry, 1953)?

Answer 19

• Person listening to two messages through headphones, one message is presented in one ear, a different message in the other ear.
• Subject told to focus on one message and repeat aloud.

Question 20

What are the findings from the Dichotic listening technique for investigating selective attention (Cherry, 1953)?

Answer 20

• Participants hardly remembedered the contents of the unattended message.
• Participants wouldn’t notice if the message changed language, but noticed if the sex of the unattended message changed.

An exception: About 1/3 of the time observers noticed strongly emotional words, their names, and the last words of the unattended message.

Question 21

Who claimed that participants were unable to detect a word even when it was spoken 35 times within a trial in the unattended message?

Answer 21

Morary (1959)

Question 22

What is Broadbent’s Attentional Filter Theory (1958)?

Answer 22

“All or nothing” view of selection.

• Incoming stimuli briefly held in a sensory register, analysed by a selective filter based on physical features.
• Only selected stimuli pass through the filter to a limited capacity channel for semantic analysis.
• Unattended stimuli are not processed for meaning and are discarded (attentional bottleneck).
• Uses a bottom-up mechanism.

Question 23

What is Broadbent’s (1954, 1958) Early Filter Theory?

Answer 23

• We only select one ‘channel’ of information for attention based on the physical characteristics of information.
• Information is not processed semantically (for meaning) until after selection.

Question 24

What are the limitations of Broadbent’s (1954,1958) Early Filter Theory?

Answer 24

• Things we’re not paying attention to can still interrupt us and catch our focus.
• We can easily switch our attention from one thing to another.
• Oversimplified: Doesn’t fully capture how flexible our attention is or how much we use our brain’s higher-level thinking to guide it.
• Information can be processed for meaning before selection.

Question 25

What is the Cocktail Party Effect?

Answer 25

Hearing your name being mentioned somewhere in a crowded room. - Unattended inputs can intrude and capture attention.

Question 26

What was concluded through the cocktail party effect?

Answer 26

There is no selective filter based solely on the physical features of the stimulus.

Question 27

What is Treisman's Attenuation Theory?

Answer 27

The main message gets through while other information is weakened. - Unattended information is not 100% eliminated but weakened. - It is processed for meaning in a second filter and can be selected if it reaches the threshold level of intensity. - Top-down processes help distinguish attended speech from competing unattended speech.

Question 28

What is the Late Selection Model?

Answer 28

- Attention only operates after stimuli have undergone perceptual analysis. - Suggests that almost all percievable properties are detected automatically by a large capacity system that operates on all of the stimuli available to our senses.

Question 29

What is attention for detection?

Answer 29

Focussing intentionally on specific aspects of our environment: - A certain position in space. - A specific feature, e.g. a particular colour.

Question 30

What is spatial attention?

Answer 30

The ability to focus on a specific region of the scene.

Question 31

What is feature based attention?

Answer 31

The ability to focus on a specific feature of an object.

Question 32

Orienting of attention to a new stimulus can be organised into three separate stages:

Answer 32

1. Disengagement from current stimulus. 2. Shifting of attention toward a new stimulus. 3. Re-engagement: Attention is focused onto the new stimulus.

Question 33

What does the Zoom Lens Metaphor propose?

Answer 33

- We can deliberately increase/decrease the area of focal attention. - The wider the area, the less efficient the search is.

Question 34

What was Awh & Pashler (2000) hypothesis on split attention?

Answer 34

The zoom lens metaphor suggests that the target in the middle should be detected as accurately as those in the cued locations.

Question 35

What are the findings and conclusions for Awh & Pashler's (2000) study on split attention?

Answer 35

Findings: - Digits were identified more accurately in cued locations compared to middle positions. - Accuracy was lowest at the far locations. Conclusions: - Attention can be split, but efficiency decreases with distance between objects.

Question 36

What is the Feature Integration Theory (Treisman & Gelade, 1980)?

Answer 36

How we piece together separate features of an object to create a more complete perception of that object.

Question 37

What happens according to Feature Integration Theory (FIT)?

Answer 37

1. Basic visual features are processed rapidly and pre-attentively (automatically) in parallel. 2. Then, a slower serial process which focuses attention provides the 'glue' to form objects from features.

Question 38

What are the types of visual attention involved in Feature Integration Theory (FIT)?

Answer 38

- Space-based - Object-based - Feature-based

Question 39

What happens during the pre-attentive stage in Feature Integration Theory (FIT)?

Answer 39

Visual features like orientation, colour, contrast, and movement are processed in parallel across separate feature maps.

Question 40

What happens during the focused attention stage in Feature Integration Theory (FIT)?

Answer 40

Individual features are combined to form a perception of the whole object. - Attention is required to combine the features.

Question 41

What is cross-modal attention?

Answer 41

The coordination of attention across two or more modalities. The ability to shift focus between different senses and integrate key information from one sensory modality with another.

Question 42

When listening to a conversation at a noisy gathering, we do 3 things:

Answer 42

1. Attend selectively to the sound of the speakers voice. 2. Integrate this auditory information with related visual information. 3. Ignore irrelevant events in both modalities.