PSYC2050 – Lecture 6: Attention Practice Flashcards

This set of vocabulary flashcards covers key concepts, theories, and experimental findings from the lecture on Attention, including types of control, selection models, and visual search theories.

Attentional limitations

The limits on what a brain can process at one time, creating a bottleneck especially at the decision-making stage.

Bottom-up factors

Stimulus-driven factors where attention is captured automatically by sudden, intense, or unexpected events.

Top-down factors

Goal-directed or voluntary factors where expectations and intentions, such as searching for a specific color, guide attention.

Selective attention

The process of focusing on a relevant stimulus while ignoring irrelevant ones, requiring the resolution of conflict between competing inputs.

Stroop Task

A test of selective attention where participants must say the color of a word rather than the word itself.

Divided attention

Splitting mental effort across two or more tasks simultaneously, such as cooking while watching TV.

Sustaining Attention

Maintaining focus over a period of time, such as listening to a lecture or following a film plot.

Shifting Attention

Moving attention between different tasks, such as watching multiple children at a park.

Endogenous control

A voluntary, goal-directed type of attentional control, such as focusing on one specific conversation at a party.

Exogenous control

A stimulus-driven, automatic type of attentional control, such as hearing your name unexpectedly.

Inattentional blindness

Missing visible stimuli because attention is occupied elsewhere, famously demonstrated by the Gorilla Experiment.

Change blindness

The failure to detect changes in a scene due to visual disruptions like eye movements (saccades), blinks, or image flickers.

Simultanagnosia

A symptom of Bálint’s Syndrome where an individual can only perceive or be aware of one object at a time.

Cocktail Party Effect

The ability to focus on one conversation while still being able to detect important information, such as your own name, from the background.

Dichotic listening and shadowing

A research task where different messages are played to each ear and the participant repeats one message aloud as they hear it.

Broadbent’s Filter Theory

An early selection structural model where physical features are used to filter out irrelevant information before meaning is processed.

Late Selection Theory

Proposed by Deutsch & Deutsch, this theory suggests all incoming information is processed to the level of meaning before selection occurs.

Perceptual Load

In Lavie’s theory, high load results in less processing of unattended stimuli, while low load results in more processing of unattended stimuli.

Working Memory Load

A load that, when high, results in more distraction from irrelevant stimuli because the cognitive system cannot effectively stop distractor processing.

Processing Capacity Theory

Kahneman’s core idea that attention is a limited pool of mental resources allocated based on task difficulty and arousal.

Automaticity

The result of practice where tasks become restructured or memorized, requiring fewer mental resources to perform.

Response Latency (RT)

The primary dependent variable in attention research, measured in milliseconds ($ms$), representing the time between stimulus and response.

Feature Search

A type of visual search where the target differs by one feature, involving parallel processing and the "pop-out" effect.

Conjunction Search

A visual search where the target is defined by multiple features, requiring serial processing and causing reaction time to increase with set size.

Feature Integration Theory (FIT)

Treisman’s theory that features are processed automatically in separate maps and attention is the "glue" needed to bind them into objects.

Guided Search Theory

Wolfe’s theory that pre-attentive features act as "clues" to rank items by priority and guide selective attention toward likely target locations.

Attentional Blink (AB)

A temporary failure to identify a second target ($T2$) if it appears roughly $200$–$600\,ms$ after the first target ($T1$).

RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation)

A task where stimuli are displayed in a single location at a rapid rate, typically about $100\,ms$ per item.

Lag-1 sparing

The phenomenon where participants are surprisingly good at reporting $T2$ if it is the very next item after $T1$ in an RSVP stream.