PSY1004: Cognitive Psychology - Lecture 4: Attention

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering selective and divided attention, perceptual load theory, filter models, visual search, eye movements, and neural attention networks based on Lecture 4 of Cognitive Psychology.

Attention

The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in the environment.

Selective Attention

The ability to focus on one message or stimulus while filtering out and ignoring others.

Divided Attention

The ability to pay attention to and process more than one thing at a time.

Dichotic Listening

A research method in which one message is presented to the left ear while a different message is presented to the right ear via headphones.

Shadowing

The experimental procedure of repeating an attended message aloud as it is heard to ensure selective listening.

Cocktail Party Effect

The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli, especially in a noisy social setting, while still being able to detect meaningful unattended signals like one's own name.

Early Selection Model

A theoretical model of attention proposing that incoming messages are filtered out based on physical characteristics before being analyzed for meaning.

Broadbent's Filter Model

An early selection bottleneck model consisting of sensory memory, a filter, a detector, and short-term memory that restricts processing to attended stimuli before semantic analysis.

Sensory Memory (Broadbent's Model)

The initial stage in Broadbent's filter model that holds all incoming sensory information for a fraction of a second before transferring it to the filter.

Filter (Broadbent's Model)

The component in Broadbent's model that identifies the attended message based purely on physical characteristics and passes only that message to the next stage.

Detector (Broadbent's Model)

The stage in Broadbent's model that processes the filtered information to determine higher-level characteristics of the message, including meaning.

Treisman's Attenuation Model

An intermediate selection model where attended and unattended messages are separated early, with unattended messages attenuated rather than completely blocked.

Attenuator

A component in Treisman's model that replaces Broadbent's filter, analyzing incoming messages in terms of physical characteristics, language, and meaning, letting attended messages through at full strength and unattended messages at a weaker strength.

Dictionary Unit

A stage in Treisman's attenuation model containing stored words, each with a specific threshold for activation; common or important words have low thresholds, while uncommon words have high thresholds.

Late Selection Model

A model of selective attention (such as MacKay, 1973) proposing that selection does not occur until after incoming stimuli have been completely analyzed for meaning.

Processing Capacity

The total amount of information a person can handle and process at any given moment.

Perceptual Load

The difficulty of a given task, which determines the amount of a person's processing capacity that must be consumed.

Low-Load Tasks

Easy tasks that take up minimal processing capacity, leaving residual cognitive resources available to process unattended, task-irrelevant stimuli.

High-Load Tasks

Difficult tasks that consume all available cognitive resources and processing capacity, leaving no capacity to process unattended, task-irrelevant stimuli.

Stroop Effect

The phenomenon in which the automatically read meaning of a printed word interferes with the conscious ability to name the ink color of the word.

Overt Attention

Observable attention that involves shifting gaze directly toward a stimulus via eye movements.

Saccades

Rapid, jerky movements of the eyes from one point of interest to another.

Fixations

Short pauses of the eyes on specific points of interest that fall within central vision.

Stimulus Salience

Bottom-up characteristics of a stimulus—such as color, motion, and contrast—that stand out and capture attention involuntarily.

Scene Schema

An individual's top-down knowledge and expectations about what typically appears in a given environment, which guides eye fixations across the scene.

Covert Attention

The shifting of attention to a specific location or stimulus without moving the eyes.

Cueing Procedure

An experimental paradigm where participants are presented with directional cues to evaluate reaction times, demonstrating faster responses to targets at expected locations.

Automatic Processing

Processing that occurs without conscious intention and requires only a portion of a person's cognitive resources as a result of extensive practice.

Inattentional Blindness

The failure to consciously perceive or notice an unattended visual stimulus, even when it is located in plain sight and the viewer is looking directly at it.

Change Blindness

The difficulty in detecting differences or changes between two similar, sequential visual scenes when attention is not explicitly directed toward the modified area.

Binding

The cognitive process of integrating separate features—such as color, shape, motion, and location—to generate the perception of a unified, coherent object.

Binding Problem

The theoretical question of how an object's individual physical attributes, which are analyzed independently by distinct neural systems, are combined into a single percept.

Feature Integration Theory (FIT)

Anne Treisman's two-stage theory proposing that visual objects are first broken into independent features during a preattentive stage and then recombined via focused attention.

Preattentive Stage

The initial, automatic stage of Feature Integration Theory in which an object is rapidly broken down into independent features without conscious effort or attention.

Focused Attention Stage

The second stage of Feature Integration Theory in which focused attention is deployed to integrate individual, free-floating features into a unified object percept.

Illusory Conjunction

A perceptual error where features from different visual stimuli are incorrectly combined because they remain free-floating prior to focused attention processing.

Balint's Syndrome

A neuropsychological condition resulting from bilateral parietal lesions that causes an inability to focus attention on individual objects and produces a high frequency of illusory conjunctions.

Attention Network

A task-positive brain network that shows increased neural activity during engaged cognitive tasks requiring focused attention.

Default Mode Network

A task-negative brain network that exhibits higher levels of activity when an individual is resting or daydreaming rather than engaged in an external task.