Chapter 5 - Attention Flashcards
What is attention
Cognitive mechanism that combine to help us select, modulate, and sustain focus on information that might the most relevant for behavior
- capacity limited
- externally and intenally
Dichotic listening
Telling them to only listen to one channel by repeating what they hear in the priority channel
People cannot recall the semantic content of the ignored channel but aware of changes in physical features (cocktail party effect exceptions)
Inhibiting distractors
1) we block unattended inputs with a filter
Blocks potential distractors
Attended inputs are not filtered out
Inatttentional blindess
failure to see a prominent stimulus, even if one is staring right at it
Change blindness
the inability to detect changes in a scene despite looking at it directly (spotting the difference)
Inattentional blindness and change blindness could result from
Early selection - A failure to perceive the stimulus
Late selection - A failure to remember the stimulus
Early and Late selection
Early selection:
- Only attended input is analyzed and perceived
- Unattended information receives little or no analysis
- Never perceived
Ex) listening to music in right or left ear
Late selection:
- All inputs are analyzed
- Selection occurs after analysis
- Selection may occur before consciousness or later
- Unattended information might be perceived, but is then forgotten
Ex) Muller line test
Spatial Attention
ability to focus attention on a specific location in space
Tasks can be seen as Endogenous or exogenous – symbol shows up and tells you to move your head vs red blobs telling you where to look
- Valid or invalid
Cost of Selection
Cost of repetition priming:
None!
Cost of expectation-based priming:
- Unexpected things suffer
- Requires mental resources
The costs of expectations reveal the presence of a limited capacity system
Attention as a spotlight
- Can be moved anywhere in the visual field
- Scope can be widened or focused
- Has implications for what is enhanced or suppressed
- Attention can move independent of eyes
-Its effects are faster than eye movements - Overt vs covert attention
Attentional control system
Spotlight metaphor is too simplistic for what we actually do
Orientating system
- Disengage attention from one target – shift attention to a new target – engage attention on the new target
Alerting system
- Maintain alert sate in the brain
Executive system
- Control voluntary actions
Selection through priming
Repetition priming – priming produced by a prior encounter with the stimulus
Expectation-driven priming – detectors for input so you think are upcoming are deliberately primed (top down)
Attention solves the binding problem
Feature integration theory
- Pre-attentive stage
- Parallel processing of the stimulus
- Efficient - Focused attention stage
- Expectation-based priming creates processing advantages for the stimulus
