Week 4

Question 1

Selective attention

Answer 1

• William James
• Withdraw attention from some things to focus on others effectively

Question 2

Dichotic listening

Answer 2

• When shadowing the attended channel people can’t even tell if the unattended channel or unattended voice is nonsense or not
• Can’t remember the unattended info
• Can tell low level perceptual info such as human or not, female or male, etc.

Question 3

Shadowing task

Answer 3

• One ear with stuff you have to repeat (shadow) and stuff in your other ear you’re supposed to ignore

Question 4

Cocktail party effect

Answer 4

• If you include salient info or info with personal significance some is remembered
  (Ex. your name, recently watched movie)
• Tells us early selection model can’t be right because some information gets through

Question 5

Broadbent → early selection

Answer 5

• Bottleneck during or before perceptual analysis
• Filter early sensory info based on physical characteristics

Question 6

Treisman → attenuation theory

Answer 6

• Filtering based on physical properties
• Unattended info is weakened but not fully blocked

Question 7

Deutch & Deutch → late filter

Answer 7

• All sensory/perceptual info goes through but you consider their importance and completely forget the unimportant stuff

Question 8

McKay priming

Answer 8

• Priming example: recall meaning of shadowed sentences is biased by unattended words

Ex. money or river / they threw stones towards the bank yesterday

Question 9

Your name

Answer 9

• Either has a very high resting activation level
• Or a very low threshold (bucket analogy)

Question 10

Directed vs captured attention

Answer 10

Directed
- You’re in control
- Endogenous (comes from within)
- “Controlled”
- Top-down and conceptual (primarily)

Captured
- Exogenous
- “Automatic”
- Bottom-up and data-driven
- Things seize your attention whether you like it or not (ex. Moral or emotional overtones, advertisements, warning sounds)
→ explains why things go viral

Question 11

Inattentional blindness

Answer 11

• Look at dot but pay attention to x, people didn’t notice changes to dot unless given warning
• Looking for something in fridge but don’t notice you’re staring right at it due to other thoughts occupying you mind
• Also inattentional deafness and numbness

Question 12

Change blindness

Answer 12

• Can’t detect changes in scenes they’re looking directly at (like what we did in class)
• Also door example from class

Question 13

Distracted driving study

Answer 13

• No disruption when listening to radio or audiobooks or even performing a shadowing task while holding the phone
• Big disruption when generating words or unconstrained conversations (handheld AND hands-free)

Hands-free or dual-tasking not the issue

ATTENTION is the issue

Question 14

Early vs late selection

Answer 14

• Early selection hypothesis, unattended info is attenuated from the start = never perceived
• Late selection hypothesis, all info gets analysis then selection occurs after

Question 15

Biased competition theory

Answer 15

Neuron temporarily biased to specific properties to help it ignore distractors

Question 16

Selection via priming

Answer 16

• Expectations of what the stimulus will be pre-activates neurons
• Prime your own visual system - sometimes by activating detectors (so they’re more easily triggered, and hence more sensitive), and sometimes by biasing detectors (so that they’re more likely to respond to the desired input)

Question 17

Perception and priming

Answer 17

• Perception is facilitated by the priming of relevant detectors
• In the absence of priming, perception may not happen at all
• Priming is sometimes stimulus driven - that is, produced by the stimuli recently or frequently encountered = repetition priming

Question 18

Target experiment

Answer 18

If the target appeared in the expected location, participants detected it a bit more quickly. If, however, participants were misled about the target’s position (so that the target appeared in an unexpected location), their responses were slower than when the participants had no expectations at all.

Question 19

Posner and Snyder 1975 Experiment

Answer 19

• repetition and expectation priming
• Start with a neutral fixation point or a fixation point similar to the stimuli or a misleading fixation point
• Show two stimuli and ask patient to say if they’re the same

Result
- Slower if they are mislead by the warning signal

Due to priming
- those in the low validity will not be primed and therefore won’t have the benefits or costs of priming

Question 20

Priming costs for other detectors

Answer 20

• Cost; priming the wrong detectors takes something away from the other detectors

Increase in allotment = decrease elsewhere, limited “budget”

• “Limited capacity system” and effort of mental resources

Question 21

Attention spotlight

Answer 21

• Like a spotlight beam of your attention shifting (not of eye movement)

Control system:
- Orienting system (shift attention) then alerting system (keep brain alert) then executive system (voluntary actions)

Question 22

Attention spotlight - what determines where it’s focused

Answer 22

• Where we shine the beam depends on the looker’s goals, culture, gender

Individualistic cultures focus on individual things rather than their connection to one another (which they would do in collectivist)

• Don’t really focus on elements we see as predictable, or that are unexpected (ex. Pink stapler in a forest)/rare

Question 23

Unilateral neglect syndrome

Answer 23

• Stop paying attention to one side of space
• Always acquired
• Usually due to a stroke

Question 24

Do spatial boundaries or object boundaries prevail?

Answer 24

• Like the spotlight or the object within it

In unilateral neglect syndrome, it’s the spotlight which is the spatial boundary (where the person draws all the letters on one half of the clock, or reads “carrot” as “rot”)

When thing from right moves to left side they still focus on that instead part (even though it switched sides), first spatial, then object’s boundaries

Question 25

Feature blinding - pro limited attention capacity

Answer 25

- Sometimes attention’s limited capacity is good so you can find specific things within broad groups (ex. multi-feature searches) - Then you won’t be confused about what to attend to

Question 26

Feature integration theory

Answer 26

- Attention glues together elements and features that are in view - Helps solve the binding problem

Question 27

Divided attention / multitasking

Answer 27

- Sometimes easy (walking while talking) - require separate resources so they won’t interfere - Sometimes hard (do homework while listening to a lecture from the same class) - require similar resources so they’ll compete - You can do multiple tasks if you have the resources needed for both Bigger difference = easier to do both tasks

Question 28

Executive control

Answer 28

- Mechanisms that allow you to control your own thoughts - Makes sure your next steps are organized in the right sequence, lets you change strategy easily - Can only handle one task at a time

Question 29

Perseveration errors

Answer 29

Tendency to produce the same response over and over even when it’s plain that the task requires a change in the response (due to brain damage)

Question 30

Goal neglect

Answer 30

Failing to organize their behaviour in a way that moves them toward their goals (ex. two Vs instead of / \ for diagonal sections)

Question 31

Effect of practice

Answer 31

Diminishes resource demand as tasks become automatic - With practice, a divided attention task can become a single organized task - Turning effortful, serial processing into parallel, automatic processing Or at least skilled performance

Question 32

Practice effect pros and cons

Answer 32

- Frees up resources but you lose control of your performance

Question 33

Stroop task

Answer 33

If high consistency between colours and word, task becomes automatic Stroop interference - Colour written is different than the colour it’s written in

Question 34

Task _ vs task _ resources

Answer 34

There are task-general and task-specific resources

Question 35

Evidence for task-specific resources

Answer 35

Shadow words presented to one ear while simultaneously memorizing: - Words presented to the other ear (very difficult) - Words presented visually (easier) - Picture presented visually (easiest) not all hard because we have task-specific resources that don't overlap when the tasks are very different

Question 36

Evidence for task-general resources

Answer 36

- Even when tasks are very different, increasing the resource requirements of one task past some critical point will reduce the efficiency of performance on one or both tasks Suggests resource limitation that is general to the two tasks, even though they are very different in nature

Question 37

Lee Brooks experiment

Answer 37

Perform verbal task requiring verbal or spatial responses Perform spatial task requiring verbal or spatial responses - If SPECIFIC, tasks should interfere only if they use the SAME set of resources - If GENERAL, all tasks should interfere → Pro-SPECIFIC Verbal responses interfere with verbal analysis but not really with spatial analysis (same for spatial) → Pro-GENERAL There is a limit to our performance in response to high demands of any two tasks, regardless of their similarity

Question 38

Dual task performance

Answer 38

Nearly always worse at trying to perform two tasks at once than one at a time Macro level → we’re always doing dual performance in our lives Micro level → when we can do two things at the exact same time

Question 39

Repetition priming vs expectation priming

Answer 39

Repetition priming - warming up one detector doesn’t have any effect on another detector priming helps, misleading no effect Expectation based priming - also produces a benefit when you get what you expect - BUT also a cost if you don’t get what you expect