Context And Attention

Question 1

Provide an example on how context influences perception.

Answer 1

Letter context influences how you perceive a word: for example, if you see the letters r and d and see a blot on a letter that could either be an f or an e, you’ll perceive the word as RED

Question 2

Explain how context informs how we attend to objects using an oven.

Answer 2

An oven is usually found in a kitchen, so you won’t pay attention to it there, however if you found an oven by a tree, you would pay more close attention to them

Question 3

Explain the Finding the T study/the vertical axis of symmetry study (Chun and Jiang)

Answer 3

Told participants that T could appear in any quadrant with distractor Ls. However, in one condition, a certain configuration of Ls would mean that T were always in the same quadrant- over time, it took less time to find the T particularly in the condition where the T could be found in the same quadrant, however participants could not discriminate the distractors between new and old afterwards. Similar thing was done for finding something with vertical axis of symmetry, participants would remember the cue, but not be able to recognize the compositions of the cue

Question 4

Why is context valuable?

Answer 4

Provides the relation between targets and distractors, constrains where we should look and what we look for

Question 5

Does the brain process location and objects simultaneously? Explain in Vo and Wolfe.

Answer 5

Participants were shown a series of images and were asked if they saw the images were previously- however some of the images were weird- right location wrong object (soap next to computer screen), right object with the wrong location (mouse on computer screen), wrong object on the wrong location (soap on computer screen). It was found through EEG that the brain activates faster when something was in the wrong location (mouse on screen) than if something was the wrong object (soap next to computer)

Question 6

Contextual cues allows us to complete tasks more ____, but those cues must remain _____?

Answer 6

Contextual cues allows us to complete tasks more quickly, but those cues must remain consistent

Question 7

Describe Schneider and Shiffrin and consistent automatic contextual cues

Answer 7

Showed participants 1 to 4 targets, which they then searched for among distractors- 4781-mkz7 (yes, 7 appears in the target), 4781 -txup (no) found that when the targets were only numbers and the distractors were only letters, performance was immediate, however was not automatic if the distractors and targets had a mix of numbers and letters- could no longer process them automatically

Question 8

Attending to _____ among objects ____ how much we attend to the objects themselves

Answer 8

Attending to relations among objects limits how much we attend to the objects themselves

Question 9

What are the four examples of context hindering attention?

Answer 9

change blindness
inattentional blindness
repetition blindness (when there’s two instances of the same occurrence)
failures of incidental memory (we encounter an object over and over again, but we’re unable to recall details)

Question 10

Describe the flicker paradigm.

Answer 10

participants were shown two images with one difference between them- the images are shown one by one with a visual mask between them- to wipe your retina clean so the image won’t flash in an out of sight, it was hard for people can tell that there were differences. Attention cues to the location of difference was needed to detect change in absence of the flash (motion cues)

Question 11

What decides what we focus on?

Answer 11

Universal dispositions and cultural dispositions

Question 12

Describe how universal dispositions can affect how change is perceived.

Answer 12

When changes involved a person, animal, moving artifact, and fixed artifact, participants reacted quicker/accurate to seeing the changes to people and then animals, notably more than moving artifacts and fixed artifacts

Question 13

Why do people and animals lead to a greater universal disposition for change focus?

Answer 13

People/animals would potentially lead to more interactions

Question 14

Discuss how cultural dispositions affect what changes we focus on in an image?

Answer 14

Showed an airport with differences in the foreground and the background. Westerners (Americans) were found to focus more on specific aspects of an image/the foreground. Easterners (Japanese) participants focused more on contextual background objects.

Question 15

Provide an example of inattentional blindness.

Answer 15

When showing radiologists and naive college students and telling them to find a tumor area in a lung, they would miss a small gorilla in the lung, despite looking at it. People were blind to it because they weren’t looking for it.

Question 16

Provide an example of repetition blindness.

Answer 16

Would ask participants to look for a target word (such as cat) and show them serially and rapidly. If the second occurrence of cat is too close to the first occurrence, some may miss it. However, if you make them look for two targets, if you have the two targets in close proximity, you would notice both of them- you are only blind to the same stimulus

Question 17

Provide an example of a study that described failures of incidental memory in telephone operators.

Answer 17

asked telephone operators to recreate a blank telephone. Almost all could reproduce the numbers but no one could reproduce the letters, and only 44% of them would select the correct arrangement with letters. This is because the letters were not relevant to what the telephone operators were doing.

Question 18

What is the research question of Simons and Levin?

Answer 18

Do individuals exhibit change blindness in real-world interactions?

Question 19

What are the alternatives of Simons and Levin?

Answer 19

Yes, change blindness is a robust consequence of attention limits on perception and memory
No, change blindness is an artifact of attending only to artificial 2d stimuli

Question 20

What is the logic of Simons and Levin?

Answer 20

If change blindness is a basic aspect of visual attention, then it should be evident in real world interactions

Question 21

What was the method of Simons and Levin?

Answer 21

Approach pedestrians on campus and asked for direction
some people walked through the scene holding a door, leading to a change in experimenters
Ask participants if they noticed the change

Question 22

What was the results of Simons and Levin?

Answer 22

Only 47% of pedestrians noticed the switch in experiment 1
only were in youngest participants (attributed to in group and out group)
Only 33% of participants noticed the switch in experiment 2
younger participants were less likely to notice the switch if participants were dressed as construction workers

Question 23

What are the inferences of Simons and Levins?

Answer 23

Change blindness is not an experimental artifact, it occurs even in real-world interactions (though both need a mask)
Changes that are detectable in side-by-side comparison may not be detected in the absence of focal attention
how we categorize others influence whether we encode their distinctive features