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Psychology Fall Sem 2024 > Chpt 4 (Attention) Psy311 Cog > Flashcards

Chpt 4 (Attention) Psy311 Cog Flashcards

1
Q

Definition: Attention

A

the ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations
Either we decide to pay attention, or our attention is directed by our env.

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2
Q

Def: Selective Attention

A

paying attention to one thing while multiple things are going on.

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3
Q

Def: Distraction

A

a stimulus that interferes with another stimulus’ processing.

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4
Q

Def: Divided Attention

A

paying attention to more than one thing.

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5
Q

Def: attentional capture

A

when a stimulus like a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement catches your attention.

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6
Q

Def: visual scanning

A

when you shift your eyes from one visual task onto another.

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7
Q

What’s Broadbent’s Filter Model of Attention?

A

Bradbent’s Filter Model of attention was made in order to explain results of another experiment done by Cherry.

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8
Q

Explain Cherry’s Experiment

A

Cherry was conducting an experiment abt dichotic listening.
The experiment was to have participants keep their attention on auditory messages in one ear and have them repeat what they heard out loud

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9
Q

Def: shadowing

A

when you repeat what you’ve heard.

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10
Q

What were the results of Cherry’s experiment?

A

Their participants were able to report the unattended message was male or female but not what was being said.

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11
Q

Def: sensory memory

A

hold incoming info for a couple of secs & transfers all info to the next stage.

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12
Q

What are the steps to your attention process?

A

Sensory Memory -> Filters out -> detectors -> STM -> LTM

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13
Q

Def: Cocktail Party Effect

A

when multiple things are going on around you, you’re able to filter out your best friend’s voice from all the background noise.

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14
Q

Def: Detector

A

when you process info from an attended message and determine the meaning. Your brain filters out which info seems important for you while ignoring info that isn’t important. The detector’s output travels to your STM then to your LTM.

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15
Q

Who predicted that we ignore all of our unattended info, we still can be conscious & try to remember that info bc it could still be important.

A

Broadbent

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16
Q

Explain Muray’s Experiment

A

participants listen & shadow a message that they heard in one ear & they were instructed to ignore everything in the other ear.

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17
Q

What were the results to Muray’s experiment?

A

⅓ of the participants heard their name in their unattended ear.
The participants were unable to filter out their name & it was already analyzed & encoded.

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18
Q

Explain the Gray & Wedderburn experiment

A

Participants were, again, told to shadow what they heard.
One hear (attended/shadowed) was the message “Dear 7 Jane” & the other was “9 Aunt 6”.

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19
Q

What were the results of the Gray & Wedderburn experiment?

A

Results of this experiment was that their attention went from one ear to the other and then right back to the 1st one.
This was explained to happen bc they were encoding the meaning of the words and put that together bc Dear Aunt Jane makes more sense than the other 2.

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20
Q

What were the changes to the filter model that Treisman made?

A

She replaced his filter with attenuator: analyzes the upcoming messages by its:
Physical characteristics - what pitch it is & the tempo
Language - how the syllables & words are grouped together.
Meaning - how these words make meaningful messages
This represents a process but not a specific structure of the brain.
However, she argued we analyze the message as far as it’s needed to identify what the message means.
After the attended & unattended messages are heard & identified, it’s then brought to the attenuator, but the attended goes at full speed & the unattended are attenuated - they are weaker. This is bc the unattended went thru the attenuator.

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21
Q

Def: Our Dictionary unit

A

what contains words, stored in our LTM, each of these has a threshold for being activated.
Has: words that have a threshold for being activated, words that are common have low thresholds & uncommon words have high thresholds.

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22
Q

Explain MacKay’s Experiment

A

how one simple sentence can be taken in other ways.
Participants heard an ambiguous sentence in their attended ear at the same time while biasing other words that were heard in the other ear.
The participants were also exposed to pairs of sentences and were instructed to indicate which of those sentences was closer to the meaning of one of the sentences that they heard earlier.

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23
Q

What were the results of Mackay’s experiment?

A

MacKay found that biased words affect what the participants picked.
This all happened when they weren’t aware that they were biasing words.
Even tho the phrases were also in the unattended ear, those were still processed.

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24
Q

How different were the late selection models of attention?

A

proposed that a lot of the info is processed to the level of meaning before further processing occurred.

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25
What info did Lavie presented?
presented 2 factors to how we ignore stimuli that are distracting to us: Processing capacity & perceptual load.
26
Def: processing capacity
which is the amount of info we can take bc there is a limit on our ability to process info.
27
def: perceptual load
related to how difficult each task is. We don’t have unlimited resources for just one thing.
28
What's the diff between a low load task & a high load tasks
LLT: tasks that take up only a small portion of our capacity that we can process. HLT: are tasks that are harder & not practiced well which then causes us to use more capacity.
29
Explain Forster & Lavie's experiment
Participants were instructed to respond to either target X or target N by pressing certain keys. This became harder when the target became surrounded by other characters. This was measured by their reaction times, the harder tasks took longer reaction times ofc.
30
Def: Load theory of attention
shows that after a low-load task we still have some capacity left. Our resources that are still there get processed & slows down.
31
Def: stroop effect
occurs bc some words have competing responses and slow responding to the target. The relevant stimuli are very powerful bc reading words is often practiced & becomes so automatic that it becomes harder to not read. Naming of the word interferes with our ability to name the ink color
32
Def: central vision
the ray of vision that has all of your attention.
33
Diff between your central vision and your fovea.
Central attention- area that you're focusing on. Fovea - the area INSIDE the central vision.
34
Def: peripheral vision
everything that doesn’t have your focus; the corner of your eye & everything on each of the sides.
35
Def: fixation
when you shift your focus on one thing for a short amount of time.
36
Def: saccadic eye movement
a fast, “jerky” shift from one fixation to the next. You move your eyes 3x per sec.
37
Def: overt attention
just shifting your attention to one thing onto another.
38
Def: stimulus salience
every physical property of each stimulus. Ex: the pattern, color, movement, etc. This is considered bottom-up processing due to the pattern of light & darkness of each stimulus.
39
Def: saliency map
how we determine characteristics of stimuli like orientation, color, intensity of each location of each scene & thing mixing those values together to make a map.
40
Def: scene schemas
our knowledge abt what should be there in each scene. A doctor's office, What’s in the room? You already have listed off what you know will most likely be present.
41
Explain the Vö Henderson experiment
where they instructed participants to look at 3 different pictures.
42
What were the results of the Vö & Henderson experiment?
Participants took longer at objects that would be out of place and this means that their attention is being affected by prior knowledge.
42
Explain the Shinoda & Co experiment
measured the participant's fixations & tested their abilities to detect certain objects during a driving simulator. Observers were more likely to spot stop signs at intersections rather than if it was positioned in the middle of the street.
43
What were the results of the Shinoda & Co experiment?
45% fixations happened close to intersections. This is also due to their expectations, bc we all know where a stop sign most likely will be.
44
Def: just in time strategy
eye movements that happen just before we need info our eyes can provide.
45
What do all of our cognitive factors & task demands all have in common?
all of them have evidence that scanning is influenced by our predictions abt what is likely to occur.
46
Def: covert attention
shifting attention while also not moving our eyes. Is called that bc the shift cannot be seen by observing the participant. This is when we shift our attention with our minds.
47
Explain the Posner & Co experiment
did a survey of questions on locations that would improve one’s ability to respond to any stimuli. Participants were instructed to look at the + sign while focusing their attention someplace else in the room (where the cue arrow was pointing) without moving their eyes. 80% of the trials the cue arrow directed their attention to the side where the target was. 20% the target arrow directed their focus away from where the target was.
48
What were the results of the Posner & Co experiment?
Participants reacted to the square more quickly when their attention was on the location where the signal was to appear. Posner looked at this result as showing that info processing is more effective at the palace where attention is directed.
49
Def: Precueing
to present a cue indicating where a stimulus would be which would enhance the processing of the goal stimulus
49
When our attention is directed at one place on an object, the _____________ of our attention ________ to other places on that same object.
enhancing effect, spreads
49
Explain the Egly & Co experiment
gave a cue signal that shows at one place then the cue is turned off & the target is shown at one of 4 possible locations: A, B, C, or D. Participants were instructed to press a button whenever the target was shown anywhere.
50
What were the results of the Egly & Co experiment?
Ppl reaction was on positions A, B, & C whenever the cue appeared at A. Participants answered quickly whenever the cue was at A. Participants also responded quickly to B but the target was at C. This is due to the location within the object that was getting the reactions. The effect was at A but their focus also spread to B too.
51
Def: same object advantage
responding that happens when enhancements spread within an object.
52
Attention not only causes ppl to respond rapidly to ________ & objects but also affects how one ________ that one object.
Locations, perceives
52
What were the results of the Cukur & Co experiment?
Cukur created brain maps with colors that show different categories. The most noticeable difference was when they searched for vehicles that occur at the top of our brain. Brain maps shift responding to a category & to additional things related to that same category
52
What were the results of the Datta & Deyoe experiment?
The experimenters were able to predict where the secret place was. Their experiment demonstrated how our attention directed by a certain location can result in our enhanced activity at one place of the brain’s cortex.
52
Explain the Cukur & Co experiment
was focusing on Huth’s brain map that illustrates the different categories of objects & actions that represent activity that distributes across a huge area of our brain. Huth made this map by having participants look at movies in a scanner, & using an fMRI scan to determine their brain activity. Cukur did the same thing but had his observers passively view the movies. A single voxel in the brain is tuned to respond to different types of stimuli under 2 conditions: When the observer is looking for ppl in the movies, the voxel responds well to people, slightly to animals, and hardly to any buildings or vehicles. But when they were looking for a vehicle in the movies, the voxel’s turning shifts now responded well to vehicles, slightly to buildings, but not to people or animals.
52
Explain the Datta & Deyoe experiment
measured brain activity by a fMRI as the participants kept their attention on the center of what they were displayed. The brain activation data shows “attention maps” that can show how directing attention to one area of space can activate a specific area of our brain. After the attention maps were determined, the participants were instructed to direct their attention to a secret stimulus.
53
Def: attentional warping
the map of categories on the brain changes so more space is connected to categories that one is searching for, & the effect happens when one category isn’t present in the film.
54
Explain the Schneider & Shiffrin experiment
required participants to carrow our 2 tasks at the same time: Holding info abt target stimuli in memory Paying attention to a series of distracting stimuli to determine whether one of the goal stimuli is present among the distracting stimuli. The memory was followed by quick presentations of 20 test frames. One frame had a target stimulus from the memory set. A new memory set was for each trial
55
What were the results of the Schneider & Shiffrin experiment?
Their performance was at 55% in the beginning; it took 900 trials for performance to reach up to 90%. Participants claimed that in the 1st 600 trials, they had to keep looking at the target items in each memory set in order to memorize them. But after the 600 trials, the task became automatic: the frames appeared and they responded without thinking abt it. This practice made it possible for the participants to divide their attention to deal with all of the targets at the same time. The Schneider & Shiffrin experiment illustrated that divided attention is plausible for some tasks that we have already practiced.
56
Def: automatic processing
processing that happens without intention without thinking abt it 1st & it comes at a cost of one’s cognitive resources.
57
Explain the Strayer & Johnston experiment
gave participants a simulation driving task that would require them to hit the brakes as fast as they can when presented with a red light, one group had no phones and the other did.
58
What were the results of the Strayer & Johnston experiment?
Those who did this simulation with cell phones caused them to miss 2x as many of the red lights as when they weren’t talking on their phone; it also increased the reaction time it usually takes to press the brake. This experiment illustrated that the same decrease in performance happened regardless of whether the participants were hands free or a handheld device.
59
Explain the Moreno & Co experiment
sent students texts at random times 6x in one day.
60
What were the results of the Moreno & Co experiment?
They found that 28% of the texts arrived when the student was on their phone or on the internet.
61
What was Pinker's solution of cell phones & driving?
claims that the solution is to not banish technology, but to come up with strategies for our self control.
62
Def: mind wandering
any of our thoughts that, from within obv, seems to overpower our focus instead of anything else that might be important.
63
Explain the Killingsworth & Gilbert experiment
Used a sampling technique to contact ppl at random intervals during the day to ask what they are doing.
64
We can do _______ unconscious tasks along with _______conscious one.
automatic, 1
65
Where we focus our conscious awareness?
High input from env. Consciously process just a tiny part of that The rest is unconscious
66
Def: selective inattention
failure to notice part of our env when our attention is directed somewhere else by someone else.
67
Explain the Finch & Lavie experiment
For a sec flashed a cross on screen in 1-5 trials & asked participants whether the vertical or horizontal line was longer. On trial 6, participants were also flashed a cross & asked which line was longer, ust like before, but there was a small square off to the left of the cross.
68
What were the results of the Finch & Lavie experiment?
After completion of the study, participants were asked if they noticed the square. Out of all 20 participants, only 2 noticed! Since they were not attending to the area where the square was (inattention) they were blind to its existence
69
Def: change blindness
difficulty identifying changes in a scene or object.
70
Def: visual search
scanning a scene to find a certain object.
71
Def: inattentional deafness
when we try to detect the tone when engaged in a hard visual search task.
72
Def: change detection
a lack of attention that can affect perception.
73
Def: continuity errors
small errors we make while watching films
74
Def: inattentional blindness
the process by which features, like color, form, motion, location, etc, are mixed to create our perception of the object as a whole.
75
What's the problem with inattentional blindness?
Different areas of our brain & processes are involved in perceiving color, motion, shape, location etc so there’s a gap in time where we perceive these things individually, & then have to mix them, & check them with our prior knowledge (top-down) to correctly perceive the situation as a whole.
76
What are the steps to the Feature Integration Theory (FIT)?
Preattentive stage Focused attention stage
77
Def: preattentive stage (1st stage of FIT)
happens BEFORE attention occurs, features of objects are detected. Ex: red, round, motion Happens automatically
78
Def: focused attention stage (2nd stage of FIT)
attention is given to objects, features are mixed. Ex: a bouncing red ball
79
Conjunction searches are useful when studying blinding bc finding the target in a conjunction search involves ________ a display in order to ________ attention at a certain location.
scanning, focus

Psychology Fall Sem 2024 (24 decks)

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