Attention: chapter 5 Flashcards
What do dichotic listening experiments typically involve?
selective attention research: selective attention; is a skill through which a person focuses on one input or one task while ignoring other stimuli that are also one the scene.
Dichotic listening task: involve participants wearing headphones, hearing one input in the left ear and a different input in the right ear. The aprticipants are instructed to pay attention to one input (attended channel) and to ignore the other ear (unattended chanel)
What sort of information is able to be detected on the unattended channel?
the unattended channel: physical attributes can be detected, so they can report if it was human speech, musical instruments, silence, if it was speech they could say whether it was a male or female voice and if it was a high or low voice or talking soft or loud. but not the actual content. they also recognised their name, and other familiar thing like maybe a recently seen movie, or a favourite restaurant, so words with personal importance.
What is inattentional blindness and how was it demonstrated in Mack and Rock’s (1998) experiment?
is a pattern in which people fail to see a prominent stimulus, even though they’re staring right at it.
like going to the fridge to find something and your staring right at it but can’t see it.
failing to see is entirely normal, perception requires more than having a stimulus in front of your eyes. perception requires work.
they dot on the screen but the participants paying attention to the cross in the corner to determining if the vertical or horizontal line was longer. the dot itself changed to another shape. if participants weren’t warned about this (so they weren’t paying attention to the dot) they failed to detect this change- even thought they had been pointing their eyes right at the dot the whole time.
What is change blindness?
observers inability to detect changes in scenes they’re looking directly at.
in experiments they show two picture and they have one thing that is different in each picture. for most people it takes a surprising amount of time and effort to locate these differences, even though some of the differences are large. apparently have a stimulus directly in front of your eyes is no guarantee that you will perceive the stimulus.
the experiment where they asking for directions and changed person.
What is the early selection hypothesis and what is the evidence for it?
is when the attended input is privileged from the start, so that the unattended input receives little analysis and therefore is never perceived.
evidence for this comes from brain’s electrical activity in the milliseconds after a stimulus has arrived. These studies confirm that the brain activity for the attended inputs is distinguishable from that for unattended inputs just 80ms or so after the stimulus presentation- a time interval in which early sensory processing is still underway.
What is the late selection hypothesis and what is the evidence for it?
all inputs receives relatively complete analysis, and selection occurs after the analysis is finished. perhaps selection occurs just before the stimulus reaches consciousness.
one study found that participants perceived (and were influenced) by background stimuli even though the participants did not consciously perceive these stimuli,
pg 157 unconscious perception
How can the priming of people’s expectations account for inattentional blindness and selective listening?
you can prepare yourself for perceiving by priming the relevant detectors, so you reach into the network and deliberately activate just those detectors that you believe will soon be needed, this will put the detectors on high alert and ready to fire. so people dont notice the shape change in the inattentional blindness studies as they werent expecting any stimulus to appear, so they has no reason to prepare for a stimulus, so when the stimulus is presented, it falls on unprepared (unprimed, unresponsive) detectors. the detectors therefore dont respond to the stimulus, so the participants end up not perceiving it.
in selective listening, you’ve been instructed to ignore the unattended input, so you have no reason to devote any resources to this input. Hence , the detectors needed for the distractor message are unprimed, and this makes it difficult to hear the distractor. but attention might “leak” so you do hear some aspects of the unattended channel, say for your name the detectors for this stimulus are already primed, not because your expecting it but because its something you have encountered a lot in past, they dont need to be primed and fire when you attention is elsewhere.
Describe Posner and Snyder’s (1975) experiment and the differences between stimulus-based (repetition) and expectation-based priming
pg161
stimulus-based-produced merely be presentation of the priming stimulus, with no role for expectation.
(detectors are primed without expectations but through exposure/repetition) this had less benefit for priming. so the low validity condition from repetition shows a small benefit (from repetition priming) but zero cost from being mislead.
expectation-based is created only when the participant believes the prime allows a prediction of what’s to come
the high validity condition (expectation-based priming) shows a larger benefit, but also higher cost.
What is spatial attention and how does it provide evidence for a limited capacity system?
spatial attention- that is the mechanism through which someone focuses on a particular position in space.
similar experiment pg 165
the participants in the mislead were 12% slower than the neutral. therefore we see evidence of a limited capacity system, in order to pay more attention to say the left position you have to devote less attention to the right, if the stimulus then shows up on the right you’re less prepared for it which is the cost of being mislead.
What does it mean when we say that spatial attention is like a spotlight beam?
the spotlight beam can “shine” anywhere in the visual field, the beam marks the space for which you are prepared, so inputs within the beam are processed more efficiently. it can be wide or narrowly focuses and can be moved about at will as you explore various aspects of the visual field.
What factors affect where we “shine” the “spotlight beam” of attention?
the spotlight idea refers to the focus of attention not the eyes movement.
as a start you pay attention to elements of the input that are visually prominent and also to elements that you think are interesting or important.
your decisions about what is important though, depend on the context. what your trying to work out say from a picture will then determine where you will pay your attention.
another study found the difference in what people pay attention to, women being more likely to pay attention to how the people are dressed and the men paying attention to body shapes and what people look like.
“if you don’t find it often, you often won’t find it”
Explain the evidence that suggests that we pay attention to objects themselves and the evidence that suggests that we pay attention to positions in space
unilateral neglect syndrome, patient seem insensitive to all object within a region that`s defined spatially, namely, everything to the left for example. so they only draw half a clock or read half a word, this supports that we pay attention to space not the whole object.
Then the barbell experiment the participants were able to focus on the object as it moved to their neglected side. showing that they could focus on the whole object.
their is evidence that attending that the brain uses different areas for when attending to space and when attending to an object.
What is divided attention?
dealing with multiple tasks or inputs at the same time.
Why is divided attention easier when the simultaneous tasks are very different from each other?
if the resources that are required for the two tasks are the same resources then it will be difficult to do the task. so if the two tasks involve language then it will be difficult to do both properly. but if the two tasks involve different resources then it wont matter so much and the two tasks can be done.
however interference can occur if tasks are simular
How do we know that there is a “general resource” that even seemingly different tasks compete with each other for?
the experiment with driving and taking on the cell phone, even hands free devices you are more likely to be in an accident if you are talking on the phone. Even though the tasks are different they are competing for a resource (general resource).
