determinants of attention and late selection Flashcards
(34 cards)
what type of attention is involuntary attention?
- bottom up
what type of attention is goal driven?
- top down
describe the biased competition theory.
top down and bottom up conflict eachother for representation.
state what kind of stimuli can ‘capture’ our attention.
- stimuli of high salience
- movement/ abrupt onset
- things that have personal relevance
what comes first: bottom up or top down attention?
- bottom up (involuntary attention)
did theeuwus find that colour singletons were relevant, even though task was to find the odd shape?
colour singletons increased RT and so new relevant.
describe the first stage of attention.
- take initial sweep across visual field
- calculation of local salience
- attention to location with highest local feature salient
what happens in the second stage of attention?
- if selected item with most salient was not the goal-target, the location is inhibited and we keep going until we find what we wanted.
define the role of the attentional window.
- pre-attentive analysis takes place only within attentional window.
- singletons outside cued location do not capture attention.
name the theory that contradicts stimulus-driven attention and instead believes that attention can only be captured by stimuli relevant to our goals.
- contingent capture.
give evidence from spatial cuing task that supports the contingent capture theory.
- colour cues capture attention when target was defined by colour, and onset cues capture attention when target was defined by onset (our goals), but not vice versa.
colour singleton should be irrelevant as target was defined by shape (circle) not colour, but did results support this?
no, colour singleton was found to be relevant as reduced RT.
what was found to reduce the effect of the colour singleton?
adding different shapes takes attention away from the colour singleton.
why is it important to detect abrupt onsets?
evolutionary reasons - enables us to detect threat rapidly to enable survival.
give a reason as to why receding stimuli do not capture attention.
- stimuli doesn’t need detecting as its moving away e.g predator is getting further away so you are safe.
what is the problem of display-wide settings?
we do well at attentional tasks because we are constantly monitoring for dynamic change - demand characteristics.
give evidence that we pay attention to stimuli that has personal relevance to us.
spider phobics showed attentional capture by spiders.
give evidence that familiarity/expertise influence attention.
expert musicians are more distracted by musical instruments.
give evidence that value captures attention.
- learn that a certain colour means reward, when tested reward-associated colours captures attention.
name key terms that are associated with cognitive control.
- working memory
- inhibition
- conflict resolution
- proactive/ recitative control
name the two types of load, and the difference between them.
- cognitive load and perception load
- high perceptual load reduces distractor processing, whereas as high cognitive load increases distractor blindness.
what the of load increases inattentional blindness?
perceptual load (less aware due to focused attention on certain target).
do all difficult tasks focus attention?
no, cognitive load increases distraction.
describe what happens during early selection.
- availability of perceptual capacity determines whether distractors receive further processing.
