9- Foundations of Attention

Colin Cherry’s experiment in which participants listened to two different messages, one presented to each ear, found that people

could focus on one message and ignore the other one at the same time

Broadbent’s model is called the early selection model because

the filter eliminates the unattended information right at the beginning of the flow of information

Which of these is the process by which features such as color, form motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object?

Binding

The notion that faster responding occurs when enhancement spreads within an object is called

same-object advantage

Which of the following best describes the relationship between auditory object formation and auditory object selection?

Formation and selection influence each other and are not easily separable

William James described attention as

Selecting one object or thought out of many possible ones

The “filter” model of attention (Broadbent, 1958) was originally motivated by

Dichotic listening experiments

Evidence that the attentional filter is “leaky” comes from

Gray & Wedderburn’s “Dear Aunt Jane” experiment

MacKay (1973) showed that unattended information can still influence meaning because participants

Chose sentence interpretations consistent with the unattended prime

Endogenous attention refers to

Voluntary, goal-directed allocation of attention

Exogenous attention refers to

Automatic capture by salient external stimuli

The Stroop effect demonstrates

Exogenous capture by the printed word

According to Feature Integration Theory, illusory conjunctions occur when

Attention is not allocated to bind features

Illusory conjunctions decrease when

Top-down knowledge is available

In Egly et al. (1994), faster responses occurred when the cue and target were on

The same object

Object-based attention has also been demonstrated in

Dichotic listening (auditory domain)

The “spotlight” metaphor of attention emphasizes

Spatial allocation of processing resources

High perceptual load reduces distraction because

There are no resources left to process distractors

The Forster & Lavie (2008) finding that distraction depends on task difficulty supports

Cognitive load theory

Attention helps solve the “binding problem” by

Linking features into unified objects

Category learning leading to perceptual warping (Goldstone, 1994) is related to

Feature-based attention

The finding that learning to categorize along a dimension recruits the same neural patterns as attending to that dimension (Luthra et al., 2025) suggests

Attention and learning share mechanisms

Posner’s spatial cueing experiment suggests that

Spatial attention boosts processing at cued locations

The “filter” metaphor emphasizes

Selective passage of some information

Bottom-up salience most strongly influences

Exogenous attention