L6 - Attention and Performance Flashcards
(28 cards)
What is attention?
A mental process of concentrating effort on a stimulus.
List the 4 key ideas about attention.
- We face more info than we can attend to; 2. Limited capacity; 3. Some tasks need little/no attention; 4. Practice reduces attention demand.
What is focused (selective) attention?
Selecting one input while ignoring others.
How do we achieve visual attention?
Eye and head movements to direct focus to important stimuli.
What is Treisman’s (1986) finding in visual search?
Takes longer to detect targets defined by a conjunction of features.
What does Feature Integration Theory propose?
Two stages: parallel pre-attentive processing, then serial focused attention (Treisman & Gelade, 1980).
What are illusory conjunctions?
Incorrectly combined features due to lack of focused attention.
What are the two types of attention networks?
Exogenous (bottom-up, stimulus-driven) and Endogenous (top-down, goal-directed).
What do valid central/peripheral cues show?
RTs are faster; reflects exogenous and endogenous attention systems.
What happens with mostly invalid cues?
Endogenous RTs = no benefit; Exogenous RTs = still faster for valid cues.
What is the Cocktail Party Problem?
Focusing on one conversation using physical cues; some info from unattended stream is noticed.
What is dichotic listening?
Auditory task requiring selection of one stream among two.
What is cross-modal attention?
Combining input from multiple sensory modalities.
What is the ventriloquism effect?
Auditory perception is biased towards visual input.
What is the McGurk effect?
Visual info alters auditory speech perception.
What did Maidment et al. (2015) find about children’s AV attention?
Younger children show less audiovisual gain; improves with age.
What is divided attention?
Attending to and responding to multiple inputs at once (multitasking).
What affects dual-task performance?
Similarity in task modality and responses (e.g., visual/manual vs auditory/vocal).
What is automatic processing?
Processing that is fast, unconscious, efficient, goal-unrelated, and doesn’t require attention.
What is the traditional view of automaticity?
Shiffrin & Schneider (1977): controlled vs automatic processing, serial vs parallel.
What are the 4 properties of automaticity (Moors & de Houwer, 2006)?
- Unconscious, 2. Efficient, 3. Fast, 4. Goal-unrelated.
What is change blindness?
Failure to detect changes in the environment (Simons & Levin, 1998).
What causes change blindness?
Limited encoding of pre/post change info, decay, or overwrite.
What is inattentional bias?
Failure to notice unexpected visible stimuli due to attention elsewhere (Simons & Chabris, 1999).
