Week 2 Flashcards
What is the Dichotic listening task?
Two competing speech inputs are presented simultaneously to the 2 ears using headphones. People are asked to attend and verbally shadow (immediately repeat each word) a train of speech coming into one ear, while simultaneously ignoring a different stream of speech coming into the other ear
What is a phenomena found in the Dichotic listening task?
Subjects are unable to report any of the details of the speech in the unattended (ignored) ear
What can be remembered in the Dichotic listening task? (Cherry)
low-level information:
–Change from voice to tones
–Change in loudness
–Change from male to female voice
What could NOT be remembered in the Dichotic listening task? (Cherry)
–Change in topic of passage
–Change from English to German
–Change from forward to backward speech!
–Change to a single word repeated over and over
What did Broadbent conclude?
- Two stimuli presented at the same time gain simultaneous access to a
sensory buffer. - One of the inputs is then allowed through a filter on the basis of its
physical characteristics while the other stimulus rapidly decays from the
sensory system. - The filter is necessary so that the limited-capacity perceptual system that
lies beyond the filter is not overloaded
What is Broadbent’s Filter Theory?
• Sensory information is processed until a
bottleneck is reached.
• One of the inputs is then allowed through a filter
on the basis of its physical characteristics, with
the other input remaining briefly in the sensory
register before it decays.
• The selective filter determines which stimuli are
further processed semantically (for meaning).
What were 2 problems with Broadbent’s early selection theory?
• People notice their own name at parties: cocktail
party effect
• Experiment: Some semantic processing from both ears if context overlapped (list of sweets)
What is Treisman’s Attenuation theory?
- Messages are attenuated but not filtered on the basis of physical characteristics.
- Semantic criteria can apply to all messages, attenuated or not.
• Semantic criteria are harder to apply to attenuated
messages, but still possible.
What is Deutsch & Deutsch’s Late Selection Theory?
A radical alternative to early filter models of auditory attention. It proposes complete, unattenuated, perceptual analysis of all stimuli.
- Proposes that the capacity limitation was in the response system, not
the perceptual system. Even unattended information is processed to the
level of meaning, but this may be outside of conscious awareness.
What was a significant finding in the experiments of unconscious priming done by Marcel?
Semantic (similar words e.g. pole then stick) similarity presented the highest rates of correct detections at the lowest SOA (secs) and then graphic (e.g. gate) similarity followed by presence/absence.
What was the main implication from the experiment done by Marcel in which a central (pattern) “backward masking” technique was used to disrupt detection of a prime word.
Central masking - pattern mask
peripheral masking - flash
Masked or unmasked response times are faster with associated priming compared to unassociated priming.
What did Stanislas Dehaene’s unconscious number priming experiment show?
That a stream of perceptual, semantic, and motor
processes can occur without awareness.
What is Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory?
One must focus attention on a set of features
before the individual features can be accurately synthesized into a pattern (an object that is a combination of these features)
What is a feature search?
Target defined by a single feature
- should not demand attention and target should pop-out
What is a conjunction search?
Target defined by shape and colour
- detection involves binding features –> so demands attention
- serial search with focal attention
