W8: Attention

Question 1

What is attention?

Answer 1

A cognitive process through which we select and prioritise information to enhance perception and cognition, involving the mental resources we dedicate to information processing

Question 2

What are the three main types of attention?

Answer 2

1. Selective attention
2. Sustained attention
3. Divided attention

Question 3

Describe selective attention

Answer 3

The ability to focus on specific stimulus while filtering out distractions, crucial for learning and info processing

Question 4

Describe sustained attention

Answer 4

The ability to maintain attention over an extended period, vital for tasks requiring continuous focus

Question 5

Describe divided attention

Answer 5

The ability to attend to multiple tasks or stimuli simultaneously (multi tasking)

Question 6

What is the cocktail party effect?

Answer 6

Refers to the ability of individuals to focus on a specific conversation or sound in a noisy environment e.g. crowd or party, while filtering out other background noise
Ongoing analysis of acoustic inputs must occur for listeners to discriminate between primary and non primary channels

Question 7

How has the cocktail party effect been observed in infants (Newman and Jusczyk, 1996)?

Answer 7

Revealed that infants as young as 7 months old can separate specific sounds from competing noise when familiarised with target words, implying that the ability to make auditory distinctions happens at a v young age and opens up more questions about the innateness of distinction patterns in selective attention mechanisms

Question 8

How has the cocktail party effect been observed in animals (Aubin and Jouventin, 1998)?

Answer 8

Demonstrated the effect in King penguin colonies who have to distinguish their colony call from hundreds of others- chicks have to be within 11 metres to make the needed auditory distinctions and only react to their own parental call
Finding revealed that the ability to make complex auditory distinctions is also seen in other species of animals

Question 9

What is the Mackworth clock effect and what does it measure?

Answer 9

Measures sustained attention- test involves a simple visual task where ppts watch a clock like device moving at regular intervals around a dial; occasionally, the hand makes a double jump instead of a single one- task of the observer is to identify and respond to double jump

Question 10

What was found in the Mackworth clock effect study?

Answer 10

Revealed that human performance in detecting irregularities declines over time, particularly within the first 30 mins, called the ‘vigilance decrement’
Has been used to measure ability to maintain and sustain attention in various fields e.g. air traffic control, radar screens
Highlights the difficulty of maintaining attention over long periods

Question 11

What does the term ‘enclothed cognition’ refer to?

Answer 11

Describes the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes

Question 12

How did Adam and Galinsky (2012) measure enclothed cognition?

Answer 12

Explored the effects of wearing a lab coat- found that wearing it is generally associated with attentiveness and carefulness

Question 13

What did Adam and Galinksy (2012) find in their FIRST experiment on enclothed cognition?

Answer 13

Physically wearing a lab coat increased selective attention compared to not wearing a lab coat, when completing a Stroop task

Question 14

What did Adam and Galinksy (2012) find in their SECOND experiment on enclothed cognition?

Answer 14

Wanted to test the symbolic meaning of wearing a lab coat and if people associate it with certain professions that increase attentiveness, so they had three conditions: wearing a doctors coat, seeing a doctors coat and wearing a painters’ coat
Administered comparative visual search tasks

They found that ppts in wearing a doctors coat condition had better sustained attention than seeing a doctors coat or wearing a painters coat

Question 15

What did Adam and Galinksy (2012) find in their THIRD experiment on enclothed cognition?

Answer 15

They thought that in experiment 2, seeing the doctors coat was simply not for long enough so in exp 3, ppts either wore a doctor’s coat, wore a painter’s coat or identified with a doctor’s coat
Again completed a comparative visual task
Ppts wearing a doctors coat again found more differences however identifying with a doctors coat increased the level of sustained attention, typical with a priming effect

Question 16

What do Adam and Galinsky’s (2012) results suggest?

Answer 16

Suggest a basic principle of enclothed cognition, involving the co-occurence of two factors, the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them

Question 17

How did Strayer and Johnston (2001) illustrate divided attention?

Answer 17

Designed a study that utilised a stimulated driving task, allowing them to examine the effects of engaging in phone conversations on various aspects of driving performance

Question 18

What did Strayer and Johnston (2001) find in their study on divided attention?

Answer 18

Results showed that ppts involved in phone call conversations were more prone to missing simulated traffic signals and exhibited slower reaction times and this was consistent whether the phone was held or hands free- proposed phone calls disrupt driving by diverting attention to a cognitively engaging task that competes with the mental focus required for safe driving

Question 19

What is INattentional bias?

Answer 19

The tendency for individuals to overlook information or stimuli that is not actively being focused on or is considered irrelevant to their current task or objectives

Question 20

What is the monkey business illusion experiment (Simons and Chabris, 1999) and how was it conducted?

Answer 20

Observers were either in an easy or hard condition- easy condition had to count the number of ball passes from a specific team and hard condition had to count the number of specific types of ball passes from a team when watching a video
In the video, a gorilla walked across the screen and after watching the video, the ppts were asked if they saw the gorilla?

Question 21

What did Simons and Chabris (1999) find in their monkey business illusion experiment?

Answer 21

46% failed to notice the gorilla, revealing a level of sustained inattentional blindness
More observers noticed the gorilla in the easy condition compared to the hard

Question 22

How did Simons et al (1999) extend their monkey business illusion experiment and what did they find?

Answer 22

They wanted to see if knowing about the gorilla beforehand would result in people being more or less likely to notice other unexpected events in the same video

They found that knowing about the gorilla beforehand did not improve the detection of other unexpected events- only 17% of those familiar with the original gorilla video noticed one or both of the other unexpected events, while 29% of those who were unfamiliar with the original gorilla video spotted the other events e.g. curtains changing colour

Question 23

What is attentional bias?

Answer 23

Refers to the tendency to selectively focus on certain stimuli based on personal factors such as expectations or emotions

Question 24

How did Civile and Obhi (2017) measure attentional bias and enclothed cognition?

Answer 24

They investigated whether wearing a police style uniform influences social cognitive processes in the wearer of the uniform

Question 25

What did Civile and Obhi measure and find in experiment ONE of their study into enclothed cognition?

Answer 25

Ppts were assigned to 1 of 2 conditions- either wearing on campus police uniform or mechanic overalls resembling a PHD student Drawn attention task They found that in experiment 1, ppts wearing a police style uniform were more distracted by images of individuals wearing hoodies (low SES) compared to individuals wearing suits (high SES)

Question 26

What did Civile and Obhi measure and find in experiment TWO of their study into enclothed cognition?

Answer 26

Half randomly assigned to police uniform condition and half randomly assigned to mechanical coat condition Ppts wearing police style uniforms were quicker to detect a dot probe that was spatially aligned with images of individuals wearing hoodies compared to when the dot probe was spatially aligned with images of individuals wearing business suits These effects on attention were specific to wearing a police style uniform and did not emerge in ppts wearing mechanic overalls or their everyday clothes

Question 27

What did Civile and Obhi measure and find in experiment THREE of their study into enclothed cognition?

Answer 27

Looked into the symbolic meaning of wearing the uniform- new ppts were recruited- half assigned to police uniform and other half just wearing their own clothes Police uniform located next to computer and stayed there for the whole experiment Demonstrated that ppts have to wear the police uniform for effects to emerge, rather than just being exposed to it, as this did not result in attentional bias to low SES stimuli

Question 28

What were the overall findings of Civile and Obhi (2017) ?

Answer 28

Results revealed that the act of putting on a police style uniform introduces attentional bias towards a certain segment of the population

Question 29

How did Heeren et al (2017) investigate social anxiety disorder and attentional bias?

Answer 29

Double blind study where single session sham vs anodal tDCS was delivered over the left dlPFC during the completion of a probe discrimination task They wanted to see whether attentional bias could be reduced for people with social anxiety disorders- reduction of this during anodal tDCS relative to sham Study comprised of questionnaires and stimulation sessions, asked to perform the probe tasks, counterbalanced

Question 30

What did Heeren et al (2017) find in their study on social anxiety disorder and attentional bias?

Answer 30

They found that active stimulation of anodal tDCS REDUCED attentional bias for threat amongst ppts with SAD, with 79% of ppts demonstrating a signif reduction of AB for threat during anodal tDCS Findings align with Bishop's hypothesis that attentional bias can be conceptualised as a failure to recruit dLPFC when processing task irrelevant threatening material