LEC 7

These flashcards cover key concepts from the lecture on perception and attention in cognitive psychology, focusing on the interactions between perception, action, and the mechanisms of attention.

What role does movement play in perception according to the lecture?

Movement helps us perceive things in our environment more accurately by providing more information for our cognitive system to process.

What is the primary difference in perceptions of a static versus a moving object?

A static object is often more difficult to identify than a moving one because movement offers more visually-based information.

What does reaching behavior demonstrate about cognitive activity?

Reaching behavior demonstrates the dynamics of cognitive activity coordinated across various networks.

What method is used to determine which brain portions are responsible for specific behaviors?

Lesioning or ablation experiments are used to identify responsible brain areas by observing changes in perceptual abilities after certain brain parts are removed.

What tasks were monkeys trained on in Ungerleider and Mishkin's study?

Monkeys were trained on an object discrimination problem and a landmark discrimination problem.

What part of the brain, when removed, affected the 'what' pathway involved in object discrimination?

Removal of the temporal lobe tissue resulted in problems with the object discrimination task.

What part of the brain, when removed, affected the 'where' pathway involved in landmark discrimination?

Removal of parietal lobe tissue resulted in problems with the landmark discrimination task.

How are the ventral and dorsal pathways of perception described?

They can be referred to as the 'what' and 'where' pathways, but may also be understood as 'action' and 'perception' pathways.

What occurred to patient D.F. as a result of damage to her ventral pathway?

She was unable to match the orientation of a card while holding it but could do so when physically placing it in a slot.

What does selective attention involve?

Selective attention involves focusing on one stimulus while ignoring others.

What was the cocktail party effect?

The ability to focus on one conversation while filtering out others at a party.

What did Broadbent's filter model suggest about selective attention?

It suggested that attention acts as a filter that allows only attended information to be processed at the beginning of the information flow.

What does Treisman’s attenuation model propose?

It proposes a model where the attended message is processed at full strength, while the unattended message is processed at a weaker strength.

According to the late selection models, when does selection for final processing occur?

Selection for final processing occurs after information has been analyzed for meaning.

What phenomenon illustrates the interference between word reading and color naming?

The Stroop effect demonstrates the competition between automatic word reading processes and the intentional task of color naming.

What is processing capacity in the context of attention?

Processing capacity refers to the amount of information that a system can handle at any given moment.

What is perceptual load?

Perceptual load refers to the difficulty of the perceptual requirements associated with a task.

What is an example of a high-load task?

A high-load task is one that uses larger amounts of processing capacity, like complex problem-solving.

What findings supported the idea of selective attention being able to filter information?

Participants generally were unable to report the content of the unattended ear message in a dichotic listening task.

What can increase reaction time in attention tasks according to Lavie’s research?

Flashing a distracting element can increase reaction time more for low-load tasks compared to high-load tasks.

What was the procedure in McKay's (1973) experiment regarding late selection?

Participants heard ambiguous sentences in the attended ear and a biasing word in the unattended ear, which influenced their responses.