CH1

Question 1

The history of research on attention can be broken into five periods:

Answer 1

1. Philosophic work preceding the field of psychology
2. The period from the founding of psychology (1860) until 1909
3. The period from 1910 to 1949, during which behaviourism flourished and interest in
   attention waned
4. The resurgence of interest in attention during the period of the cognitive revolution
   from 1950 to 1974
5. Contemporary research dating from 1975 to the present.

Question 2

Vives:

Answer 2

The more closely one attends to stimuli, the better they will be retained.
Learning consists of the formation of associations, and retrieval occurs through
automatic activation of the associated areas or through intentional search.

Question 3

Malebranche

Answer 3

we have access to ideas/mental representations of the world, but not
the world itself. Attention is needed to make the ideas clear.

Question 4

Leibnitz:

Answer 4

introduced the concept of apperception: an act that is necessary for an
individual to become conscious of a perceptual event. To him, attention is directed
towards events automatically but is also voluntary: attention is a determination of the
soul to know something in preference to other things.

Question 5

Hamilton thought that

Answer 5

People were capable of attending to more than one thing at once

Question 6

Hick-Hyman law

Answer 6

the probability of occurrence of a stimulus influences the

time to respond to whichever one occurs

Question 7

voluntarism

Answer 7

the study of conscious decision
and choice (Wundt)

Question 8

perception (wundt)

Answer 8

the entry into

the field of attention

Question 9

apperception

Answer 9

was responsible for entry into the inner focus

Question 10

Lotze proposed that

Answer 10

conscious attention occurs to varying degrees, with lower processes
such as sensory experience not always accompanied by higher processes involving
comparison of relations between the simple sensations or between them and previous
experiences

Question 11

Attention contains three essential constituents:

Answer 11

increased clearness of ideas, muscle

sensations, and feelings

Question 12

Pillsbury emphasized that

Answer 12

the contents of attention can be found both in the environment
and in the past experience of an individual

Question 13

Task set

Answer 13

the readiness to carry out an instructed

action in response to a given stimulus.

Question 14

James’ definition of attention is probably the most used:

Answer 14

“the taking possession by the mind,
in clear and vivid form, of one of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains
of thought. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”

Question 15

james suggested several ways in which attention could be classified:

Answer 15

it is directed either to (a) objects of sense (sensorial attention), or to (b) ideal or represented
objects (intellectual attention).

It is either (c) immediate, or (d) derived.

Attention may be either (e) passive, reflex, non-voluntary, effortless; or (f) active and voluntary. The last shows a distinction between exogenous control (attention is drawn automatically) or endogenous control, in which it is voluntary.

Question 16

Lotze introduced ideomotor action:

Answer 16

the links between movements and their mental
representations are bi-directional, thus allowing the representations to directly produce the
movements. James was a strong advocate of this, and says that sometimes you don’t need
consciousness, and sometimes you do

Question 17

Jersild:

Answer 17

reported experiments in which subjects had to make a series of judgements
regarding each stimulus in a list as a function of whether a single task was to be performed
for all stimuli or whether two tasks were performed in alternating order. He found that the
time to complete the list was longer for mixed lists than for pure lists of a single task.

Question 18

Telford:

Answer 18

discovery of the psychological refractory period effect: stimulation of neurons was
followed by a refractory phase during which the neurons were less sensitive to stimulation.
Responses are slower when a stimulus follows the preceding one by a short interval.

Question 19

psychological refractory period effect

Answer 19

stimulation of neurons was
followed by a refractory phase during which the neurons were less sensitive to stimulation.
Responses are slower when a stimulus follows the preceding one by a short interval.

Question 20

Vigilance decrement:

Answer 20

mindlessness or a withdrawal of effort from the subject after doing the same task for long periods of time

Question 21

Cherry:

Answer 21

dichotic listening in which he presented different messages to each ear through
headphones. Participants had to shadow (repeat aloud) one of the two messages, and
afterwards were unable to tell anything about the ignored message. From this finding,
Broadbent developed the filter theory

Question 22

(Broadbent) the filter theory

Answer 22

information is held in a preattentive temporary store, and only sensory events that have some physical feature in common are selected to pass
into the limited capacity processing system.

Question 23

filter-attenuation

theory (Treisman)

Answer 23

says that early selection by filtering precedes stimulus identification, but the
filter attenuates the information only on unattended channels.

Question 24

Deutsch and Deutsch proposed the late-selection theory

Answer 24

unattended

stimuli are always identified and that the bottleneck occurs in later processing

Question 25

Kahneman’s model is

Answer 25

the most well known unitary capacity (or resource) theories: attention
is a single resource that can be divided among different tasks in different amounts.

Question 26

Event-related potentials:

Answer 26

experiments that used psychophysiological techniques to find activity relating to the processing of a stimulus.

Question 27

Multiple resource models:

Answer 27

it is easier to perform two tasks together when the tasks use
different stimulus or response modalities than when they use the same modalities, so
attention is better viewed as multiple resources.

Question 28

space-based approaches…

Answer 28

say that attention is seen as a spotlight that directs attention to
everything in its field. Exogenous (external events) and endogenous (typically a symbol like
an arrow that must be identified before a voluntary shift in attention to the designated
location) cues can both trigger movement of the attentional spotlight to a location.

Question 29

Feature

integration theory

Answer 29

basic features of stimuli are encoded into feature maps in parallel across
the visual field at a preattentive stage. The second stage involves focusing attention on a
specific location and combining features that occupy the location into objects.

Question 30

Object-based models of attention

Answer 30

view objects as being the primary unit on which attention
operates. In the first stage of selection, a visual representation is formed that is segmented
into object-like units that contain meaning codes. After this, there is competitive interaction
between inputs for awareness.

Question 31

negative priming

Answer 31

when trials contain one stimulus
that should be ignored and one stimulus that should be responded to. The negative priming
occurs when first there was a probe trial when the stimulus had to be ignored, and that is
now the relevant stimulus.

Question 32

Selection-for-action view

Answer 32

attentional limitations should not be attributed to a limited capacity
resource or mechanism, but limitations are byproducts of the need to coordinate action and
ensure that the correct stimulus information is controlling the intended responses.