Attention Flashcards
(44 cards)
1) Selective Attention
2) and why
3) example
- attending to relevant info and ignoring distracting info
- limited processing ability
- select the important things only
- focus on one task, ignore distractors
- inattentional blindness
Early Filter Model
- filter out distracting or irrelevant info at the level of perception
- similar to Broadbent
- distracting info is removed at sensory buffer
Apophenia
Seeing meaningful patterns in meaningless input
Components of Attention
-Top Down: Frontal, parietal and limbic
::: Observer guides attention
-Bottom up: Visual, auditory, somatosensoiry
:::: Stimuli guides attention
-Arousal Mechanism: Ascending reticular activating
:::: Alerting attention
Sustained Attention
-ability to focus on one task
-VIGILANCE
-sustained attention response task (SART)
:series of number is presented, respond only to target
Inattentional Blindeness
definition
- related to selective attention
- failure to recognize a new stimuli because you are focusing on something else
Support for Early Filter model
- Dichotic listening tasks
- worse when switching ears, info decay
-Selective Looking Tasks
: like the gorilla
- Shadowing tasks:
- participants hear 2 messages in headphones binaurally,
- must attend to one or the other, can only retain content from the attended message
- still gather info from the unattended message, like sex of speaker
- filtering out info at perceptual features, but
Shadowing Tasks
- participants hear 2 messages in headphones binaurally,
- must attend to one or the other, can only retain content from the attended message
- still gather info from the unattended message, like sex of speaker
- filtering out info at perceptual features, but
Arguments against Early Filter model
- process some information at semantic level
1) attend to your name when hearing it at a party
2) -shadowing tasks with shock. pair words with shock stimulus. when playing the shock words to an unattended ear, people still have physiological response to words
- skin conductance goes up
- registering the sematnic content at some level
Late Filter Theory
-Stroop Task:
:congruent trial, very easy
:incongruent trial, much harder
treisman’s attenuation Theory
- early filter model, says that filter attenuates unattended information
- doesnt shut OFF the information, just quiets it down
- meaningful information can still
Stroop Task
- name the color of the ink in a printed color word
- much faster with congruent trials than incongruent trials
- processing unattended information at semantic level
- automatically process the words
Automatic versus controlled task
examples in Stroop Task
- activities that do not require conscious attention to run smoothly
: naming the color word
:bottom up - activities we must attend to consciously
: name the color of the ink
: top down
Load Theory
- task difficulty will determine how and when we select our attention
- we WANT to use up all our resources during a task
Load Theory
- task difficulty will determine how and when we select our attention
- we WANT to use up all our resources during a task
Difficult versus easier tasks (LOAD THEORY)
- difficult:
- attention is selected early, focused on one thing
- filter out extra info because of high perceptual load
- like early selection filter
easy:
- processing all info within capacity
- attention is selected later
- process irrelevant information, less focused
- like a late filter, more distracting information moves further down processing pipeline
if asked to find the letter “A” out of 5 letters, will you do it faster or slower than if asked to find the letter among 20 letters? Why?
- Faster
- Higher perceptual load, less attention resources to divert to distracting details
Capacity Model
Two views
- Central Resource capacity
- Multiple Resource Capacity
Central Resource Capacity
- attention from any task is coming from the same place
- using up attention means you wont have attention resources for other stuff
Multiple Resource capacity
- different senses have different pools of attentional resources
- visual distractors wont hurt auditory tasks
Support for Central Resource capacity
-Driving simulator:
- either with or without radio playing
- measure likelyhood that participant will detect an unusual stimuli
- with auditory distractor (radio on) less likely to to notice visual stimuli
Evidence for Multiple REsource Capacity
- participants in two conditions, high auditory load, low auditory load
- during both, participants saw visual distractors
- used PET scan to see whether visual processing parts of brain were active (they were)
- didn’t affect the ability to process the auditory information
Attentional Blink
- look for a target, when presented the target will miss another target that comes right after
- celebrating the victory of attending to one target
- shows that there is a processing capacity, because we need more time to recognize both targets, we’ve used up attentional resources
- if targets are within 500ms of eachother
Unilateral neglect
and tests for it
- damage to Parietal lobes, important for TOP DOWN SPACIAL PROCESSING
- half of spatial recognition field is gone, typically left side, both in memory and physical representations
- cancellation task, mark out lines
- draw an image
