Attention - week 4 (Chris) Flashcards
(16 cards)
Monkey business illusion
The monkey business illusion (and other experimental paradigms based on it) demonstrates a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness
It highlights the slightly worrying reality that we’re actually far less aware of things happening in the world around us than we think we are
It demonstrates how powerful selective attention is
- Selective attention enables us to focus on task relevant information while filtering irrelevant information out of awareness.
Also demonstrates the limited capacity of attention
Defining attention
We are able to select a particular object amongst others and subject it to further processing or to act upon it.
This process of selection is generally what we mean by attention (although there are other forms of attention, e.g. sustained attention).
Attention is not the same as looking at something
Inattentional blindness
Inattentional blindness demonstrates that we can be looking at something but not selectively attending to it, and therefore not aware of it
Overt attention
Turning head or eyes to orient towards a stimulus
Covert attention
Paying attention to one thing while appearing to pay attention to another
Selective attention is also multisensory
We can selectively attend to visual, auditory, tactile stimuli – and we can also switch attention between the senses.
The cocktail party effect
An example of covert attention is the cocktail party effect, where you are in a room with multiple audible conversations, and you are able to focus only on the person currently speaking to you. However, you are also able to instantaneously switch attention to a neighbouring conversation whilst appearing to carry on listening to the other person if you hear something interesting.
Cherry (1953) Experiment to assess covert selective attention: The dichotic listening task
Subjects listened to two simultaneous sentences spoken into their two different ears and attended to one sentence and ignored the other. They had to shadow the attended sentences, that is repeat them out loud.
Subjects could not detect most properties of the unattended channel:
- language used
- meaning of the message
- content
Subjects did notice
- Gender of the voice
- Physical attributes, e.g. human vs musical instrument
> > Attention filters out most information
- Attention operates at an early stage in processing
Early selection
Attention operates at an early stage in the processing stream
- Filters out irrelevant information
Problems with early selection theories: context effects
Often, subjects notice their own name, or other highly relevant information, on the unattended channel.
Ambiguous sentences in a dichotic listening task (MacKay, 1973)
Attended stream: ambiguous sentence “They were throwing stones at the bank”
Unattended stream: biasing word “river” or “money”
The biasing word had a clear effect
If “money”, sentence interpreted as financial institution
If “river” sentence interpreted as side of river
Late selection
Late selection models suggest that all stimuli receive semantic analysis before attentional selection filters what enters into awareness.
Spotlight Model of Attention (Posner 1980)
Posner argued that attention operates like a spotlight, enhancing sensory processing of objects in the spatial location to which it is directed.
Interpretation of the Posner cueing effects
Attention increases efficiency of information processing by influencing sensory and perceptual processing
Posner hypothesised that the behavioural effects of cues were caused by neuronal enhancement/suppression in early visual cortical areas – Early selection
Attention enhances processing of objects occurring in particular spatial locations
Change blindness
This change blindness effect suggests attention does not operate like a simple spotlight
What is selected by attention? Locations or objects?
Objects are typically situated in a particular location so how can we distinguish between the effects of spatial attention and the effects of object-attention?
Egly et al. (1994)
Subjects saw two shapes and were cued to a location on one of the shapes
Then a target appeared either in the same object same location, same object different location, or different object.
Crucially, in the last 2 conditions, the spatial distance between the cue and target was the same but in one they both appeared in the same target, in the other they appeared in different targets.
RTs are faster if the cue and the target occur in the same object, even if they are in different locations.
The results demonstrate that attention operates in an object-based frame of reference.
Attentional selection
Attentional selection operates on objects, not locations
This is evidence for late selection because the visual scene must be subject to a reasonable amount of visual processing (parsing features into objects etc.) before attention operates to determine what is selected
