Chapter Four - Attention Flashcards
1
Q
What is attention?
A
-ability to focus on specific stimuli/locations in environment
2
Q
What is selective attention?
A
attending to one thing while ignoring others
3
Q
What is divided attention?
A
paying attention to more than one thing at a time
4
Q
What is a distraction?
A
-one stimulus interfering with the processing of another stimulus
5
Q
What is attentional capture?
A
rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus (loud noise, bright light, sudden movement)
6
Q
Why is selective attention an evolutionary advantage?
A
-wouldn’t be able to function well if we had to focus on every stimui
7
Q
What is the Colin Cherry experiment?
A
- one message presented in left ear, another in right ear
- participant shadows one message to ensure he is attending to that message
8
Q
What is the results of the dichotic listening experiment?
A
-participants could not report content of message in unattended ear
9
Q
What is the cocktail effect?
A
-ability to focus on one stimulus and filter out others
10
Q
In dichotic listening, is the info in unattended ear being processed?
A
- yes
- change in gender + tone is noticed
11
Q
What are 3 models of selective attention?
A
- Early selection model (Broadbent)
- Intermediate selection model (Tresiman’s Attenuation Theory)
- Late selection model (McKay)
12
Q
When does filtering happen in the Broadbent’s model?
A
-filters message before incoming info is analyzed for meaning
13
Q
what are the 5 components of Broadbent’s model?
A
- messages
- sensory memory
- filter
- detector
- to memory
14
Q
What does sensory memory do? (Broadbent)
A
- holds all incoming info
- transfers all info to next stage
15
Q
What does the filter do? (Broadbent)
A
- identifies attended message based on physical characteristics
- passes on attended message
16
Q
What does the detector do? (Broadbent)
A
-processes all info to determine higher-level characteristics of the message
17
Q
What is Broadbent’s model also referred to?
A
bottleneck model
18
Q
Does the filter slow down the flow of info in the Broadbent model?
A
-no, it just restricts information flow
19
Q
What are 3 shortcomings/challenges to Broadbent’s model?
A
- we should not be conscious of unattended msgs
- participants name gets through
- participants can shadow meaningful msgs that switch from one ear to another
20
Q
What is Treisman’s Attenuation Theory?
A
- intermediate-selection model
- attended message can be separated from unattended message early in info-processing system
- selection can occur later
21
Q
What are 4 parts of the Treisman’s Attenuation Theory?
A
- messages
- attenuator
- dictionary unit
- memory
22
Q
What does the attenuator do? (Treisman’s)
A
-analyzes incoming msg in terms of physical char. language + meaning
23
Q
What happens to the attended message? (Treisman’s)
A
-let through at full strength
24
Q
What happens to the unattended message? (Treisman’s)
A
-let through at a much weaker strength
25
What is the dictionary unit? (Treisman's)
- contains words
| - words have thresholds of activation
26
In Treisman's Theory what happens to unattended inputs?
-attenuated, but not turned off
27
In Treisman's Theory, How is selection based?
-in an ordered hierarchy:
| physical cues, syllabic pattern, specific words, individual words, grammatical structure, meaning
28
What is McKay's model?
- late selection model
| - selection of stimuli for final processing doesn't occur until after info has been analyzed for meaning
29
What was McKay's experiment?
- attending ear: ambiguous sentences
| - unattended ear: "river" "money"
30
What was the result of McKay's experiment?
- participants had to choose which was closest to meaning of attended message
- meaning of biasing word affected participants' choice
- participants unaware of presentation of biasing words
31
What was McKay's final conclusion?
- biasing words affect subjects' judgements
| - so words must be processed to level of meaning even when unattended
32
What is processing capacity?
how much info a person can handle at any given moment
33
What is perceptual load?
difficulty of a given task
34
What are high-load tasks?
-use higher amounts of processing capacity
35
What are low-load tasks?
use lower amounts of processing capacity
36
What is the Load Theory of Attention?
- presentation of task irrelevant to stimulus slows response time
- effect is stronger for easier tasks than harder tasks
- perceptual capcity remains for harder tasks
37
What is the Stroop effect?
- name of word interferes with inability to name ink color
| - cannot avoid paying attention to the meanings of words
38
What is the influence of practice of the Stroop Effect?
you can overcome the Stroop Effect to some degree with practice
39
What is overt attention?
shifting attention to one place to another by moving the eyes
40
What is covert attention?
shifting attention from one place to another by keeping the eyes stationary
41
What are saccades?
rapid movements of the eyes from one place to another
42
What are fixations?
short pauses on points of interest
43
What is central vision?
area you are looking at
| -fovea
44
What is peripheral vision?
everything off to the side
45
What is stimulus salience?
areas that stand out and capture attention
46
What kind of process is stimulus salience?
- bottom-up process
| - depends on physical characteristics of stimulus
47
What is attentional capture?
involuntary shift of attention due to stimulus salience
48
How is scanning based on cognitive factors?
scanning based on meaning of features
49
What is a scene schema?
knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes
50
What kind of process is a scene schema?
top-down
- help guide fixations from one area to another
- result in variations in how people scan scenes
51
What is covert attention used in?
sports
52
What is precueing?
- directing attention without moving the eyes
| - participants respond faster to a light at an expected location that at an unexpected location
53
How do we covertly attend to specific objects?
- attention can enhance response to objects
| - attention directed to one place on an object, enhancing effect of that attention on other places on object
54
What did Schneider and Shiffrin find about divided attention and practice?
-practice enables people to simultaneously do two things that were difficult at first
55
What was Schneider and Shiffrin's experiment with divided attention?
-divide attention between remembering target + monitoring rapidly presented stimuli
56
What was Schneider and Shiffrin's major conclusion about divided attention?
- practice made it possible for subjects to divide attention
| - automatic processing occurs without intention
57
Automatic processing is ____ dependent
task
58
Why is automatic processing task dependent?
-if task is hard, automatic processing not possible even with practice
59
What are 3 things that consisted naturalistic driving?
1. no experimenter present
2. data collected in privately-own vehicle
3. instrumentation = unobtrosive
60
What are 3 advantages of the "naturalistic" approach?
1. more detailed pre-crash/pre-near crash information
2. greater external validity
3. rich database
61
What was the naturalistic driving study?
- 100 car participants
- ages 18-73
- wide range of miles driven
- drove on all road classes
- urban, suburban, small amount of rural driving
- sedans and SUVs
62
What was the primary contributing factor in most crashes and collisions (naturalistic driving)
inattention to the forward roadway
63
80% of all crashes + 65% of near crashes involved at least _____
one form of driving inattention just prior to the onset of the conflict
64
93% of the conflict with lead vehicle crashes + minor collisions involved
looking away
65
What 2 factors have the highest associated crash risk?
1. moderately complex secondary tasks
| 2. driver drowsiness
66
What are some disadvantages to the naturalistic approach?
- costly + logistically complex
- no experimental control over driver experience
- possible recruiting bias due to nature of the study
- extreme age groups missing
67
What was the finding of the Strayer and Johnston simulated driving task?
-participants on cell phone missed twice as many red lights + took longer to apply the brakes
(same result using hands-free cell phone)
68
What is inattentional blindness
stimulus that is not attended is not perceived even though a person might be looking directly at it
69
What experiment was done to show inattentional blindness?
- Cartwright Finch and Lavie
- cross stimulus, choose which is longer
- missed square that popped up
70
What is change blindness?
-if shown two versions of a picture, differences between them not immediately apparent
71
Why does change blindness occur?
identifying differences requires concentrated attention and search
72
What is binding?
-features (color, form, motion, location) combined to create our perception of a coherent object
73
What is the Feature Integration Theory?
-addresses binding problem (how an object's individual features become bound together)
74
What are the 4 components of the Feature Integration Theory?
1. object
2. preattentive stage
3. focused attention stage
4. perception
75
What occurs in the preattentive stage (FIT)
- analyze into features
| - automatic, no effort
76
What happens in the focused attention stage (FIT)
- combine features
| - attention plays key role
77
What is an example of the Preattentive stage? (FIT)
-rolling red ball:
color, shape, movement
-features processed in separate area of the brain
-exist independently
78
Why do illusory conjunctions occur according to Treisman and Schmidt? (FIT)
features are "free floating"
79
What are 3 qualities of the focused attention stage?
1. "free-floating" features are combine
2. attention plays key role
3. features are combined
80
Who was RM?
-patient with Balint's syndrome
81
What are 2 qualities about RM?
- inability to focus attention on individual objects
| - high number of illusory conjunctions reported
82
What part of RM's brain was damaged?
parietal lobe
83
What does FIT suggest about patients like RM?
-lack of focused attention makes it difficult for them to combine features correctly
84
What kind of process is FIT?
-bottom-up
85
What is attentions affect on neural responding?
enhances neural responding
86
Where does attentional processing happen in the brain?
distributed across large number of areas in brain
87
What is a topographic map?
spatial map of visual stimuli on visual cortex
88
What are 2 qualities of a topographic map?
1. each point on visual stimulus causes activity at specific location on visual cortex
2. points next to each other on stimulus cause activity at points next tot each other on visual cortex
89
Using fMRI what did Datta and DeYoe show about attention processing?
-increase in activity in areas corresponding to specific locations where subjects were paying attention to
90
What did Datta and DeYoe create?
attention maps
91
Why are attention maps used for?
-after training classifiers, able to predict where someone was paying attention to
92
What did O'Craven find about attention and objects?
- paying attentino to objects increases activity in parahippocampal gyrus
- focusing on faces, increase in FFA
