PSY 654 - attention

dichotic listening task

wearing headphones participants hear:

one message in the left, another in the right ear

told to pay attention to one message and ignore the other

attention

info processing

selection

experiencing a coherent world

neural evidence

info processing

dichotic listening task

shadowing - following the attended message while ignoring the other message

coctail party effect - personally important info can capture your attention

Broadbent's Filter Model

Lots of information enters → The filter selects the attended information→

Unattended information is blocked.

attended info→deeper processing and memory

Treisman's Attenuation Model

Unattended information is not completely blocked

instead its attenuated(weakend)

attention as a selection

overt vs covert attention

overt attention

directly looking at something you are attending to.

Covert attention

attending to something without directly looking at it

fixations (overt)

your eyes stop briefly on something so you can process it.

Saccade (overt)

the quick eye movement from one fixation point to another.

stimulus salience vs cognitive f (overt)

Stimulus salience = something about the physical stimulus attracts your attention (bottom up)

Cognitive factors = your knowledge, goals, interests, or past experiences guide attention (top down)

Posner precuing paradigm (covert)

Keep eyes in the center; attention shifts to the cue. Valid cue = faster, invalid cue = slower.

attention as a selection

divided attention - trying to pay attention to more than one task at the same time.

attention has limited capacity

Attention and experiencing coherent world

Feature Integration Th

obj → preattentive stage (features separated) → focused atten st (features combined) → complete perception

attention - neural evidence

superimposed stimuli - attention changes what the brain processes, even when the physical stimulus itself has not changed.

what the participant attends to changes brain activity.

Attend to face → fusiform area responds more.

Attend to place → place-processing area responds more.