Lecture 4 Flashcards
Attention part 1 (23 cards)
What is attention according to William James (1890)?
Attention is the mind’s ability to focus on one item among many while ignoring others.
What is the purpose of attention in cognition?
To allocate limited cognitive resources by selecting relevant stimuli and filtering out irrelevant information
What is dichotic listening?
A task where two different audio messages are played into each ear, and the listener is asked to attend to only one.
What is shadowing in auditory attention research?
Repeating aloud the message from one ear (the attended channel) to ensure focus on that input.
What did Cherry (1953) find in dichotic listening tasks?
People could detect physical changes (voice gender, tones) but not semantic changes (language, reversed speech) in the unattended ear.
What is the “cocktail party effect”?
The phenomenon where someone notices personally relevant information (e.g., their name) even in an unattended message.
What did Moray (1959) conclude about attention?
Some semantic processing occurs even in the unattended ear, challenging strict early selection models.
What is Broadbent’s Early Selection Theory (1958)?
Information is filtered early based on physical characteristics before semantic processing occurs.
What is Treisman’s Attenuation Theory (1960)?
The unattended channel is not blocked, just weakened, allowing important or primed stimuli (like your name) to get through.
What is Late Selection Theory (Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963)?
All stimuli are processed for meaning, and selection occurs just before response.
What did Corteen & Wood (1972) demonstrate?
Conditioned city names in the unattended ear triggered Galvanic Skin Responses, suggesting semantic processing without awareness.
What was a problem for late selection theories shown by Treisman & Riley (1969)?
Target detection was lower in the unattended ear, implying not all information is equally processed.
What is the difference between overt and covert attention?
Overt attention: Directing gaze toward a stimulus.
Covert attention: Mentally focusing attention without moving the eyes.
What did Posner et al. (1978) show about spatial attention?
Participants can shift attention covertly to a location, speeding up detection if a cue is valid.
What is perceptual load in Lavie’s Load Theory (1995)?
The sensory demands of a task. High perceptual load → early selection; low load → late selection.
What is cognitive load in Load Theory?
The working memory demand of a task. High cognitive load impairs the ability to inhibit irrelevant information.
According to Load Theory, when does early vs. late selection occur?
High perceptual load → early selection
Low perceptual load → late selection
High cognitive load → weakened late selection
What is the Biased Competition Model of attention?
Stimuli compete for limited processing resources, and attention biases the competition toward task-relevant input.
In the Biased Competition Model, where does selection occur?
At multiple levels of processing, not at a single point—depends on stimulus strength, task demands, and relevance.
What is the functional purpose of attentional selection?
To prioritize goal-relevant information, enhance processing efficiency, and prevent overload in neural systems.
In dichotic listening experiments, some aspects of the unattended message seem to leak through and are heard despite the participant’s intention to ignore the message. Which of the following statements reflects what is LEAST likely to leak through?
material that is easily distinguishable from the attended message in its semantic content
In the context of selective attention, what is meant by the term “attenuation”
the reduction in strength of an unattended message
According to Lavie (e.g., 2005), if all other factors held constant, susceptibility to distraction is greater when the task involves what?
Low perceptual load
