Chapter 4: Attention Flashcards
(37 cards)
What is selective attention?
The ability to focus on a subset of perceptual information that reaches the senses.
How is selective attention studied?
Dichotic listening task.
What is a dichotic listening task?
When participants are told which ear to attend, they can effectively filter out the other non-relevant message.
What makes the dichotic listening task easier?
It is easier if physical characteristics of the two voices differ.
What happens to the unattended message in a dichotic listening task?
Early selection view: Don’t gain meaning because the information is dropped before it can reach the meaning stage. Late selection: Filters the information at a later stage, after meaning is extracted.
What is evidence for late selection?
Despite blocking out background chatter during conversation, many of us will notice if our name is spoken in a different conversation.
What does the shadow study demonstrate?
Participants started to repeat the unattended channel to maintain the meaning of the sentence.
What is the spotlight metaphor in attention?
Attention acts as a spotlight, selecting a region of space for further visual processing.
What is overt attention?
Movement of eyes toward attended regions.
What is covert attention?
Eyes remain stationary, shift of ‘mind’s eye.’
Can selection be object-based?
Yes, we can selectively attend to either the face or the house presented at the same spatial location.
How is object-based selection studied?
RT faster on same object trials compared to different object trials, even though the target is equidistant from fixation in both cases.
What is pop-out visual search?
Carried out in parallel.
What is conjunctive visual search?
Carried out in serial and requires feature ‘binding’, which is attentionally demanding.
What is inattentional blindness?
Conjunctive search requires feature ‘binding’, which is attentionally demanding.
What is attentional blink?
A phenomenon that occurs when someone has difficulty identifying a second visual target that appears shortly after the first.
How does attentional blink happen?
The second target is often missed if it appears within 200-500 milliseconds of the first.
What causes attentional blink?
It is thought to be a result of a late-stage processing deficit.
What is a central processing bottleneck?
This limitation arises at the response selection/decision stage.
What is the effect of short SOA on task performance?
Task 2 is influenced by SOA; RT for task 2 is very influenced by the amount of time between the tones.
What is dual task performance?
Performance on Task 2 suffers at short SOAs because response selection/decision processes for Task 1 drain resource pool.
What is sustained attention?
How do we assess this in the laboratory? Sustained Attention to Response Task.
What is the vigilance task?
Performance declines over time - vigilance decrement.
What is resource depletion?
The consumption of a resource faster than it can be replenished.
