Chapter 4 Attention

Question 1

What is attention?

Answer 1

the mental energy or resource necessary for completing mental processes, believed to be limited in quantity and under control of some executive control mechanisms

Question 2

What are the 6 meanings of attention and how are they classified?

Answer 2

They are classified as either Input Attention or Controlled Attention. I.A: 1)Alertness or arousal 2)Orienting reflex or response 3) Spotlight attention & search C.A: 4)Selective Attention 5) Mental resources & conscious processing 6) Supervisory Attentional system

Question 3

Global-local distinction

Answer 3

when processing visual info, such as a scene or objects, one can focus attention on either the larger whole or the parts that make up the whole. ex) seeing either a T that is made up of small H’s or seeing the small H’s

Question 4

What is the DMN Default mode network?

Answer 4

a collection of brain structures that tend to be more active when a person is at rest and not thinking about anything in particular. Hence, more active by default.

Question 5

Input Attention

Answer 5

basic processing of getting sensory information into cognitive system

Question 6

What is a necessary precondition for most cognitive processing, including attention?

Answer 6

arousal

Question 7

Vigilance or Sustained Attention

Answer 7

the maintenance of attention for infrequent events over long periods of time-

Question 8

Explicit Processing

Answer 8

involving conscious processing, conscious awareness that a task is being performed, and usually conscious awareness of the outcome of that performance

Question 9

Implicit Processing

Answer 9

processing in which there is no necessary involvement of conscious awareness

Question 10

what did the word stem completion task study by Bonebakker illustrate?

Answer 10

it illustrated the implicit processing capacity of humans, by demonstrating that patients who had undergone surgery and anesthesia were able to implicitly remember certain words they had heard during surgery while unconscious

Question 11

Orienting Reflex

Answer 11

the reflexive redirection of attention that orients you to the unexpected stimulus—>location finding response of immune system

Question 12

Attention Capture

Answer 12

spontaneous redirection of attention to stimuli in the world based on physical characteristics

Question 13

Visual Attention

Answer 13

input attention (specifically as it relates to visions typically associated w/the spotlight metaphor)

Question 14

Habituation

Answer 14

a gradual reduction of the orienting response back to baseline ex: getting used to traffic sounds on street

Question 15

Spotlight Attention

Answer 15

a rapid attentional mechanism operating in parallel & automatically across the visual field, especially for detecting simple visual features

Question 16

What is a Visual Search?

Answer 16

when you search a spatial display of items for the presence of a target

Question 17

Pop-up effect

Answer 17

when a target is highly discriminable from the distractors

Question 18

Inhibition of return

Answer 18

a process in which recently checked locations are mentally marked by attention as places that the search process would not return to

Question 19

Controlled Attention

Answer 19

the deliberate, voluntary allocation of mental effort or concentration–especially driven by conceptual driven (top down) processes -operates in parallel with spotlight attention

Question 20

What is a disruption in the ability to focus your attention to one side of your visual world called?

Answer 20

Hemineglect ex: Bisiarch & Luzatti’s test in the Italian plaza where people w/the condition could only describe half the plaza with their eyes closed.

Question 21

Selective Attention

Answer 21

the ability to attend to one source of info while ignoring or excluding other ongoing stimuli

Question 22

Inattention Blindness

Answer 22

when people fail to attend or process some info because they have their direction focused on different stimuli

Question 23

Filtering/selecting

Answer 23

when unwanted unattended messsages are filtered or screened out so that only the attended message is encoded into the central processing mechanism (Broadbent’s filter theory)

Question 24

Dual task method

Answer 24

a method in which two tasks are performed simultaneously, such that the attentional & processing demand of one or both tasks can be assessed & varied

Question 25

Cocktail Party Effect

Answer 25

Selecting one message in a crowded, noisy environment -usually if message has meaning

Question 26

Early Selection

Answer 26

selection or filtering based on early phases of perception (e.g. loudness or location)

Question 27

Late Selection

Answer 27

selection of filtering baed on the meaning & importance of the information (e.g. semantic relevance) -demonstrated in Treisman’s shadowing experiment where she switched the attended message & unattended message to pop. ears—-but they did not continue to repeat the ‘wrong’ message for long

Question 28

Inhibition

Answer 28

an active suppression of mental representations of salient but irrelevant info so that activation is reduced

Question 29

What is an example of Negative Priming

Answer 29

slower to respond to the target trials when they were proceeded by irrelevant distractor primes compared to control trials where the ignored object on the prime trial was an unrelated trial

Question 30

Psychological refractory period or attentional blink

Answer 30

a delay in a second decision or response cycle if its is required immediately after a preceding decision

Question 31

Automacity

Answer 31

(William James’ idea) occurring without conscious awareness or intention & consuming little, if any, of the available mental resources

Question 32

Stroop Task

Answer 32

an example of automacity whereby people were asked to name the physical colour of a colour word- people had difficulty because we automatically process the colour when reading it

Question 33

Three theories on the role of practice and memory

Answer 33

1) Logan & Klapp’s storing theory 2) Perfecl, Andrade, & Eagen’s closed eyes theory 3) Shiffrin & Achneider’s theory consistent & varied theory

Question 34

Explain Logan & Klapp’s theory of practice & memory

Answer 34

they suggested that the effect of practice is to store relevant info in memory- considering the necessary precondition for automacity is memory. -Once it has become automatic devoting explicit memory to the task can lead to worse outcomes (think athletes overthinking)

Question 35

Explain Perfecl, Andrade, & Eagens theory of Practice & Memory

Answer 35

this theory suggests that you can avoid automatic processing or irrelevant material by closing you eyes- not processing info from visual world frees attention resources that can no do other things

Question 36

Explain Shiffrin & Achneider’s theory of practice & memory

Answer 36

their theory focuses on automatic & controlled processing, whereby people who partook in consistent mapping groups showed signs of automacity, where those in varied mapping groups had to use slower controlled processing.

Question 37

What are the disadvantages of automacity? Explain

Answer 37

-Action Slips: unintended often automatic actions that are inappropriate for the current situation (e.g. grabbing a womans hand you thought was your mom) -Mind Wandering: when a person’s attentions & thoughts wander from the current task to some other inappropriate line of thought (people with more working memory capacity are more likely to mind wander, because simple tasks don’t grasp all their attention capacity)

Question 38

Yerkes Dodson Law

Answer 38

is an empirical relationship between arousal and performance, originally developed by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson in 1908. The law dictates that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point.

Question 39

Cognitive task

Answer 39

an experimentally constructed situation for studying a particular small set of cognitive skills or activities

Question 40

What work did Michael Posner do?

Answer 40

-has done classic studies on attention • Posner & Snyder (1975) as an illustration of priming • now a leading researcher in the new field of cognitive neuroscience

Question 41

What could listeners remember about the unattended (nonshadowed) message? What could they not remember?

Answer 41

• physical characteristics (e.g., loudness, male or female voice, location) -they couldn’t remember if it was played in reverse, another language, meaning, or a word repeated 35 times

Question 42

What is Donald broadbents theory?

Answer 42

• one of the first information processing theories-filter model of attention • the filter idea strongly influences theories of attention even today -posits that stimuli are filtered, or selected to be attended to, at an early stage during processing. A filter can be regarded as the selector of relevant information based on basic features, such as color, pitch, or direction of stimuli.

Question 43

Anne Treismans work in attention?

Answer 43

Attended/shadowed (left): …. sitting at a mahogany three objects • Unattended (right): …. let us examine these table with her • should shadow the attended channel, but instead says ‘TABLE’. Meaning “pulls” you to the other channel

Question 44

What is Kahneman’s Capacity Theory?

Answer 44

related arousal and performance, using attentional contro

Question 45

What is High Validity?

Answer 45

priming that is 80% helped, like flashing an H before showing the target trial that is two H’s.

Question 46

What is Low Validity?

Answer 46

prining that is 80% misleading, like flashing a T before the target trail of two H’s. The T disrputs our processing ability of the H’s.

Question 47

What are the three types of traisl in Snyder and Posners priming?

Answer 47

Neutral: flashing a + before two A’s

Misled: flashing a T before two H’s

Helped: flashing an H before two H’s

Question 48

Instance theory of automacity?

Answer 48

Logan (1988)
• to perform a controlled task, we must use an algorithm = a slow sequence of processes guaranteed to work
• each time we perform the task, we store a memory representation of the processing act, called an instance

Question 49

Horse race model of automacity?

Answer 49

In Logan’s theory, as more instance are stored, the probability of retrieving one faster than the algorithm increases
• Eventually, every time the algorithm races the instances, it will lose
• Automaticity = that point where an instance always wins the race with the algorithm

Question 50

What did Deutsch & Deutsch/Norman add to Treismans attenuated model of attention?

Answer 50

They added the late selection phase of meaning.

Question 51

What is Treismans model of attention?

Answer 51

Attenuated filter model, sees the filter as less of a screen but rather as an attentive mechanism, that focuses on what it wants. But things you aren’t focusing on can still come in. (shadowing experiment)