PSYC2050 QUIZ 3

Bottom-up: exogenous or endogenous?

exogenous: due to external attention grabs (stimulus driven)

Top-down: exogneous or endogenous

endogenous: internal judgements or expectations (goal driven)

Selective attention; give an example

Trying to select on feature while suppressing other features
- made difficult by: making irrelevant features, relevant later. select between two competing alternatives (e.g. stroop test)

Divided attention; what is it? what do researchers manipulate

- dividing attention over two concurrent tasks, reveals attentional limits.
- researchers manipulate:
1. priority of task (which one is relevant or a distractor).
2. temporal overlap (the closer =the harder)

Inattentional blindness: what is it? give examples.

failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere

e.g. change blindness

What does inattentional blindness tell us

- attention is more than meets the eye
- we only perceive a small portion of the world
- what we see is what we attentionally set

Balint's syndrome

bilateral
occipital/parietal
lobe damage
prevents
patients from
perceiving more
than 1 stimulus
at a time.
Grouping stimuli
helps this.

Metaphors for attentional limitations

- structurally: bottlenecks (lots of sensory input but only some info gets through)
- process: spotlight (***)
- strategic view: need to coordinate action and ensure that the correct info is extracted

Hemholtz: covert v. overt

- letter with light and target
covert: pay attention without looking
overt: orienting to pay attention

Cocktail party effect

Ability to concentrate on one voice amongst a crowd. Yet we can easily hear our name being called

What can be reported in a unattended message (dichotic listening) What can't be reported?

- speech v. music
- gender, pitch and tone
- cannot create meaning and language

Broadbent's filter theory

can listen to perceptual features but not message
- evidence for early selection
- broadbents strucutral model: filter stops info from flowing into system

Evidence contradicting broadbent's filter theory (Mackay bank)

Mackay: unattended message to bias the meaning (river bank, money bank)
- Ps select other message that related to the unattended message over the bank in the attended, even though no meaning of original message was reported
- evidence for late selection

Late selection (Deutsch & Deutsch)

unattended material is processed all the way to meaning but is discarded

Treisman and geffen: ealy vs. late theory. What did it support? problems with testing?

Ps more likely to tap to target words appear in attended message than unattended message

- supports early selection

problem: late selection: tap and shadow mssg cannot be organised to two inputs at same time

Lavie's load theory of attention

Intensity of load and concentration on central task determines if early or late selection.

Low-Perceptual Load vs. High- Perceptual Load Tasks

Low: Minimal distractor -> late selection -> effect of distractor more because less concentrated to central task
High: heavy distractor -> early selection, effect of distractor is less. more attention given to central task

Working memory load

- opposite effect of perceptual load
- higher the load, more the error

- high load (lots of numbers to remember) -> more distraction -> early selection
- low load (one number to remember) -> less distraction

Kahneman's Processing Capacity Theory

Attention capacity limits dependent on: difficulty (resource demand) and arousal
- about processing not structure

Automaticity

- task demands decreases with practice
- gaining more automaticity could expand attentional capacity/resource

Visual cognitive revolution used? dv iv

- dv: reaction time to stimulus
- rt increases as task becomes more difficult
- accuracy may be a better dv for timed tasks or processing tasks

Preattentive/ feature search

- feature (pop-out) uses parallel processing
- features include: colour, size, direction etc.
- e.g. red x amongst black x's
- sample size does not matter.

Attentive/ conjunctive search

- conjunctive Serial item search
- red x amongst black O's and red X's (the conjunctive part)
- sample size effects RT
- TARGET PRESENT 50% OF TIME

- have to focus with eyes and object

Effect on RT and number search items

FASTEST: feature search (parallel) -not size effected
SECOND FASTEST: conjunction search (serial) target present - size effected
SLOWEST: conjunction search - size effected and slope doubled when target absent

Feature Integration Theory (FIT)

Explains how an object is broken down into features and how these features are recombined to result in a perception of the object and its location
- can be done without focused attention
- attention required to bind features into objects

limitations of fit

- features dont always pop out (change blindness)
- patterns override features
- the heterogeneous (hard) or homogeneity (easy) of distractors on RTs

Guided Search (Wolfe)

Attention uses features (colour, size etc.) to detect objects (top-down)
- no pop-out or conjunctive because results are not bimodal.
- all search is attentive and depends on difficulty of task and distractors
- INCREASED DIFFICULTY = STEEPER RT SLOPE

Explain RSVP and AB. What causes AB?

- Rapid Serial Visual Presentation is a task used to find attentional blink

- Attentional blink (second of two targets cannot be detected or identified when it appears after the first.)

- not being able to detect and report T1 = AB (not being able to report T2)

Lag 1 sparing

AB dissapears for T2 if it appears directly (extremely close) after T1 (nothing in between)
- processed as one event

what reduces attentional blink?
what increases attentional blink?

making T1 easier to identify
making t1 more difficult

pattern masks

- AB influenced by other items before or after targets
- disturb processing of targets when following target even if they can not recall, it still disturbs