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CogPsych 4
Chapter 4: Attention
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What is attention? | Cognitive mechanism that selects relevant information over irrelevant information for further processing |
| What is selective attention? | Attending to one thing while ignoring others. |
| What is a distraction? | One stimulus interfering with the processing off another stimulus |
| What is divided attention? | Paying attention to more than one thing at a time |
| What is attentional capture? | A rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light or sudden movement. |
| Describe Broadbent's filter model of attention (bottleneck) | Information goes thru 4 stages: 1. Sensory memory: transitional store 2. The filter identifies (based on physical traits) and transmits only message 3. Detector processes message to determine higher traits e.g. meaning 4. Output goes to STM |
| What is the cocktail party effect? | The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli. At noisy parties, people are able to focus on what one person is saying even if there are many conversations happening at the same time. |
| What is dichotic listening? | It is presenting different stimuli to the left and right ears. |
| What is shadowing? | Repeating what you are hearing. |
| Describe Cherry (1953)'s experiment on dichotic listening, and attention. | Play audio to different ears (dichotic), and focus your attention on the words in one ear and as you hear the words, repeat them out loud (shadowing). He found that subjects could not report what was being said in the unattended ear. |
| What is visual scanning? | Movement of the eyes from one location or object to another. |
| What is an early selection model of attention? | A model where the filter eliminates the unattended information right at the beginning of the flow of information. e.g. Broadbent's filter model, Treisman's attenuation model |
| What did Neville Moray (1959) find that contradicted the predictions of Broadbent's model | When Moray presented the listener's name to the unattended ear, about a 1/3 of the subjects detected it. However, the filter is supposed to let through only one message, and is not supposed to be analysed. |
| In an experiment conducted by Gray & Wedderburn (1960), subjects heard the phrase "Dear Aunt Jane" instead of the message "Dear 7 Jane" which was presented to the attended ear and "9 Aunt 6" that was presented to the unattended ear. Why? | Subjects were taking the meaning of the words into account, an example of top-down processing. |
| What is Treisman's attenuation theory of attention? | 1. Attenuator analyses the incoming message in terms of its physical characteristics, language and meaning. Analysis proceeds; unattended = weakened. 2. Dictionary unit: important/common words have low thresholds and activated = hearing |
| What did McKay (1973) find that provided evidence for late selection? | The meaning of the biasing word presented to the unattended ear affected the subjects choice in picking a word for a sentence presented to the attended ear. |
| What is a late selection model of attention? | Most of the incoming information is processed to the level of meaning before the message to be further processed is selected. |
| What is processing capacity? | The amount of information people can handle. |
| What is perceptual load? | The difficulty of a task: easy tasks have low perceptual loads and thus use up a small amount of the person's processing capacity. |
| What is Lavie's load theory of attention? | Low-load tasks that use few cognitive resources leave resources available to process unattended task-irrelevant stimuli. High-load tasks that use all of a person's cognitive resource don't leave any resources to process unattended task-irrelevant stimuli. |
| Describe the Stroop task. | Naming the colour of ink used to print the words instead of the colour the word is describing. |
| What is the Stroop effect? Why does it happen? | It is harder to name the colours of the words than reading the words. The names of the words cause a competing response - reading words is highly practiced and has become so automatic that it is difficult not to read them. |
| What is overt attention? | Shifting attention from one place to another by moving the eyes. |
| What is covert attention? | Shifting attention from one place to another while keeping the eyes stationary. |
| What is central vision? | The area you are looking at. |
| What is peripheral vision? | Everything off to the side when viewing something. |
| What is a fixation? | Focusing the fovea on a stimuli. |
| What is a saccade? | A rapid, jerky movement from one fixation to another. |
| What is stimulus salience? | The physical properties of the stimulus such as color, contrast or movement. |
| What are the two factors that affect how people shift their attention? | Bottom-up (physical characteristics) or top-down (previous knowledge)S |
| Is capturing attention by stimulus salience a bottom-up or top-down process? | A bottom-up process, because it depends solely on the pattern of light and dark, color and contrast in a stimulus |
| What is attentional capture? | When attention due to stimulus salience causes an involuntary shift of attention. |
| How does saliency influence the way we see a scene? | 1. We analyse characteristics such as color, orientation and intensity at each location in the scene. 2. We then combine these values to create a saliency map of the scene. |
| What did Parkhurst et al. (2001) find regarding saliency? | The first few fixations are closely associated with prominent physical characteristics. After that, scanning begins to be influenced by top-down processes that depend on things like the observer's goals and expectations. |
| What is the "just in time" strategy in scanning? | Eye movements occur just before we need the information they will provide e.g. fixating on something before picking it up |
| Describe the Posner precueing experiment. | The subject was to press a key ehen a target square was presented off to the side. These alternate between valid (cue presented appears on the side indicated by an arrow) and invalid. |
| How were the results of Poser's precueing experiment interpreted | Posner interpreted it as showing that information processing is more effective at the place where attention is directed - lending credence to the spotlight theory of attention, where processing is improved in the location. |
| Describe Egly's (1994) precueing experiment. | Subjects kept their eyes on a + sandwiched between 2 rectangles. A cue signal then appears at one place on the display, and a target is flashed at one of 4 possible locations. |
| What did Egly's precueing experiment show? | Cues presented within the same object, even if invalid, were still responded to faster: same object advantage. |
| What is the same object advantage? | Faster responding that occurs when enhancement spreads within an object. |
| What is divided attention? | The distribution of attention among two or more tasks. |
| What is automatic processing? | Processing that occurs without intention and at a cost of only some of a person's cognitive responses. |
| What is inattentional blindness? | Not attending to something that is clearly visible. |
| What is change blindness? | The difficulty in detecting changes in scenes. |
| What is binding? | A process by which features such as colour, form, motion and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object. |
| Describe Treisman's feature integration theory. | 1) Preattentive stage: features are processed early and in parallel in individual feature maps 2) Focused attention stage: Attention is focused on the features to combine - information from all feature maps combined serially in master map of locations |
| How did Treisman & Schmidt (1982) prove that objects are analysed into features? | They flashed a display consisting of 4 objects flanked by 2 black numbers onto a screen for 0.2s followed by a random-dot masking field to eliminate residues. 18% saw objects that were combinations of stimuli at the shape areas - illusory conjunctions. |
| According to Treisman, why do illusory conjunctions occur? | In the preattentive stage, each feature is "free floating" - existing independently of the other - and thus can be incorrectly combined if there is more than one objevt. |
| Describe the case of patient R.M. | He was a patient who had parietal lobe damage leading to Balint's syndrome - an inability to focus attention on individual objects. He was unable to bind features even after long exposure to stimuli. |
| Although feature analysis is mostly bottom-up processing, sometimes top-down processing occurs. Describe how Treisman & Schmidt (1982) showcased this in an illusion conjunction experiment. | When subjects were told that they were viewing a specific object, illusory conjunctions were less likely to occur. The subjects' knowledge of the usual colors of objects influenced their ability to correctly combine features of each object. |
| What is a visual search? | Looking for an object among a number of other objects. |
| What is a feature search? | Searching for a target among distractors based on a single feature. |
| What is a singleton in visual search? | A target with unique features. |
| What is a conjunction search? | Searching for a target amongst distractions based on a combination of (conjunction) more than one feature. |
| What are the features that a serial search is defined by? | 1) Reaction time to identify target increases as the number of items in the display (set size) increases. 2) Search slopes of "target present" function half that of "target absent" function |
| What is a parallel search defined by? | Reaction time to identify target remains constant as the number of items in the display increases. |
| What is the 'pop-out' effect? | The relative ease of finding targets in a feature search; the phenomenological feeling (excepting searches for the absence of a feature) |
| What is attentional blink? | The phenomenon that occurs when the second of two targets cannot be detected or identified when it appears close in time to the first (between 200ms and 500ms of first target). |
| Describe an experiment featuring attentional blink? | 1) Participants are shown a series of stimuli in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream 2) Then, asked to identify targets amongst distractors. |
| Explain attentional blink. | Attention is deployed in periods over time to enhance processing of sequentially presented items; each period lasts 100-200ms. However, once deployed, focusing on a different target requires disengagement and redeployment (500-600ms). |
| What is Johnston and Heniz (1978)'s proposed multimode theory of attention? | Multimode theory: Individual’s intentions and demands of the task determine position of filter - Selective attention (i.e., filtering) requires cognitive resources - Required cognitive resources increases from early to late selection |
| What is a disadvantage of the multimode theory of attention? | do not explain why required cognitive resources increases from early to late selection |
| What is Kahneman's (1973) theory of attention? | • Attention allocates cognitive resources to tasks based on initial evaluation of task difficulty • Arousal increases or decreases the amount of cognitive resources |
| What is attention allocation in Kahneman's theory of attention affected by? | “enduring disposition” and “momentary intention” • Enduring disposition: Automatic influence where people direct their attention • Momentary intention: Conscious decision to allocate attention to certain task or aspects |
| What are the disadvantages of Kahneman's theory of attention? | • Kahneman’s (1973) original theory of attentional capacity too circular in reasoning - Does not explain specifically how capacity affects attentional selection |
| Describe the flanker task. | example: Press left button if X is in circle, but right button if N is in circle. Ignore the flanking letter outside the circle as they are irrelevant to the task, low-load: surrounding letters in circle the same |
| What did Lavie find from the flanker task? | Those who had high load reacted faster than those who had low load. |
| What determines if attention can be divided among tasks? | - Automaticity of task Tasks can be “automatic” or “controlled” • Automatic tasks (e.g., well practiced tasks) requires little or negligible attentional resources • Controlled task (e.g., novel tasks) requires considerable attentional resources |
| How did Shriffin & Schneider (1977) demonstrate automaticity in divided attention? | They asked subjects to memorize a set of letters or numbers; subjects then identify members of the memorized set when letters and numbers are presented rapidly to them. |
| What did Shriffin & Schneider (1977) find regarding if a task can be automated? | • Consistent mapping (i.e., targets and distractors are always distinct) leads to automaticity • Inconsistent mapping (i.e., targets and distractors varies from trial to trial) does not lead to automaticity |
| What happens with consistent mapping? | Improvement with practice for consistent mapping condition; Arrow indicates point in which participants report tasks becomes “automatic” for them; Results of experiment with 4 target stimuli in memory set, and 2 stimuli in each frame |
| What happens with inconsistent mapping? | Participants reach > 90% accuracy when frame duration is only 80 ms for consistent mapping; Participants only reach > 90% accuracy when frame duration is 400 ms for varied mapping; Varied mapping more difficult and not automatic |
| What is attentional control? | Executive control in context of performing complex tasks that requires switching between tasks. Attention is not only “divided” amongst different tasks, but also “controls” which task to perform at any point of time. |
| Describe Norman & Shallice's (1986) model of controlled attention. | Highly practiced and familiar tasks stored as “schemas”. • Schemas automatically triggered by familiar perceptual cues in the environment • Attention required to “override” schemas in order to perform novel task |
| What is the role of the Supervisory Attention System in Norman & Shallice's (1986) model of controlled attention? | • It directs or chooses tasks based on controlled processing • SAS active in only in cases of controlled processing - novel situations - difficult tasks - problem solving - overcoming schemas and response conflicts |
| Why do we do tasks slower when our attention is divided rather than focused on one task? | Switching between tasks involve costs • When participants asked to perform pure tasks blocks vs alternating, they tend to perform faster in pure task blocks • Task switching cost due to changing of task sets when one switches to a different task |
| Describe the spotlight theory of attention. | Attended region (i.e., under the spotlight) receives more processing than unattended regions - Region approximately 1 degree of visual angle - Stimuli falling under the “spotlight” are usually identified more accurately and also much faster |
| How does attention shift in the spotlight theory? | • Attention shifts across space takes a longer time with larger distance • Similar to eye movements, attention as a spotlight can be “summoned” to spatial regions via “top-down” or “bottom-up” means |
| What are examples of top down and bottom up processes in spotlight theory? | • Top down processes (Directing Attention) - verbal instructions (e.g., look left!) - centrally presented arrows (e.g., ← ) • Bottom up processes (Capturing Attention) - peripheral movement or contrast change - new objects |
| Describe the experiment Rock & Gutman (1981) carried out to test spotlight theory. | - asked participants to rate irregular red or green shapes on how “pleasing” they are - Participants later given a surprise memory test - Participants recognized attended shapes about 3 times better than unattended shapes |
| What did the attended-unattended shape experiment carried out by Rock & Gutman (1981) prove? | • attention directed to a space need not necessarily improve processing of all items located in that space • Attention can be directed to objects • Difficult to establish if attention can be “object-based” as objects and space are often confounded |
| Describe spotlight theory vs object-based theory. | Spotlight - we move our attention to parts of the visual field. Object-based - we move our attention to objects. |
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