Psych Week 14 (Cog) - Attention, Short-Term Memory and Thought

What is a dichotic listening task (selective attention)?

• Given two messages and told to ignore one by repeating the other

• Later is asked about the unattended information after a single trial

• Participants could report if there was a voice or not, but no physical attributes, content or language

What is Broadbent’s filter model (for selective attention?

• Proposes humans can only process a limited amount of sensory information at a time

• Drawn as a Y-shaped bottleneck with balls - only one ball can be processed at a time

What is Moray’s cocktail party phenomenon (for selective attention)?

• Highly pertinent stimuli such as one’s name can suddenly capture attention in a noisy environment

• Priority effects problematic for Broadbent’s static filter model

What is subliminal perception?

• Information subconsciously received

• Attention not necessary

• Briefly presented words are semantically processed which may affect the processing speed of subsequent, semantically related words (semantic priming effects)

What is negative priming?

• Prior exposure to an ignored stimulus in one trial slows down processing speed when it is the focus in the following trial

• e.g. red and green pictures overlaid, instructed to name the red overlay in the first trial

  • Redirection of attention to the green overlay in the next trial is slowed down

What is Kahneman’s capacity theory of attention?

• Attention is a limited, shared resource

• Easy task requires less attention and allows multitasking

• Individuals have substantial control over allocation of attention, but performance declines if attention exceeds supply

What changes the available capacity of attention (Kahneman’s capacity theory)?

• Difficulty of task

• Arousal (point in circadian rhythm, medication etc.)

• Individual differences

• Momentary intention (how important it is for the individual)

What is short-term memory and why is it good?

• Information is held briefly and has severely limited capacity

• Useful for complex cognitive tasks like arithmetic

• Useful for proprioception - you don’t remember who was around you afterwards

What does Miller suggest about short-term memory capacity?

• Claims that ~7 items can be held simultaneously in STM

• STM makes contact with representations stored in minds

• Capacity independent of the nature of the information

How does the digit span task support Miller’s ideas about short-term memory capacity?

• Lists with increasing number of items asked to recall

• List longer than 7 items - poor recall performance in the middle

  • Start of list - good recall (primacy effect, contribution of LTM)

  • End of list - good recall (recency effect, contribution of STM)

What was anterograde amnesiac patient H.M’s memory like?

• Defective LTM - could not acquire new information

• Normal STM - once material exceeded his memory capacity, he couldn’t store it

• Can be doubly dissociated with cases of impaired STM but working LTM to infer that they are separate systems

What is the modal memory model (Atkinson-Shiffrin)?

• Information must pass through STM before it enters LTM

• Different memory stores

• The longer an item is held in STM, the more likely it is to be transferred to LTM

What is the working memory model (Baddeley and Hitch)?

• STM has more than one component

• Amodal central executive to integrate information

• Supported by two modality-specific peripheral systems

  • Phonological loop (speech-based)

  • Visuospatial sketchpad (shapes, colours, motion etc.)

• One peripheral system being impaired should not affect the rest of working memory

What is the word-length effect (working memory model)?

• STM performance affected by word length

• Does not corroborate with Miller’s ~7 items in memory, because why would there be a word length effect?

What is the classical view of concepts (Plato, Locke etc.)?

• Concepts defined by exhaustive list of necessary and sufficient semantic features (e.g. a cat has whiskers, purrs and catches mice)

• Difficult to have an exhaustive list

What is the Rosch family resemblance principle?

• Members within a category all have prototypical features but they don’t have all of them

• Prototype with all characteristics may not exist in reality

• Grouping based on similarity and overlapping features

• Graded membership - some closer to prototype than others

What is the exemplar theory of concepts (Medin and Schaffer)?

• Do not compare members to a prototype but to other members of a category

• Classifying a new instance is related to how easily it brings instances of other category members to mind

• Instances encountered more frequently are retrieved faster (e.g. apple vs fig as a fruit)

What are behavioural economics?

• Effects of psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors on the decisions of individuals and institutions

What is homo economicus?

• Imagined person with an infinite ability for rational decisions

• Assumption that humans are perfectly rational agents that maximise utility for monetary and non-monetary gains

• Economic exchange driven by self-interest

What are heuristics?

• Mental shortcuts that are effective when having to make fast decisions

• Often violate pure rationality with bias, replacing slow reasoning with a fast heuristic

• e.g. ‘how much would you contribute to save an endangered species?’ vs ‘how sad do I feel about dying turtles?’

What is availability bias?

• Judged on memory-related probability

• If thinking of flying and remember significant airline accidents (9/11 etc.), may choose to travel by car instead

• Airline accidents are low probability but high risk in mind

What is conjunction fallacy?

• Combined probability of 2 events is always less than the independent probabilities of those events

• More information decreases joint probability, but people believe the opposite

• More information makes people think it is more likely to be true