Cog exam 2

What is attention?

mental process that concentrates effort on a stimulus, limited resource

Why is talking on a cell phone while
driving more dangerous than talking with a passenger?

requires more attention to focus on conversation

Selective attention

focusing on chosen event, limiting distractions

divided attention

focusing on two or more things at a time

automaticity

ability to perform process with little to no attention

mind wandering

attention wanders from current task

Spotlight attention

mental attention focusing mechanism for preparing to encode stimulus

Spatial Cuing Task (Posner): task & results

participants fixate on screen and respond when target is presented on either side of screen. Arrow on screen depicts location of target correctly or incorrectly

Significance of Posner's spatial cuing task

spotlight attention is mental and can be shifted before stimulus appears and is triggered by cognitive factors.

Visual Search (Treisman, CL2): method & results

participants indicate if target (green circle) is present in trials with feature search or conjunction search. Conjunction absent search increased rt most

Difference between feature and conjunction search

feature search had one distractor shape/color, conjunction search had two distractor shapes/color

Significance of Treisman visual search

two types of attention processes: quick, automatic process and slower, deliberate process.

Shadowing task

participant repeats what they hear in selective ear

dichotic listening

participant wears headphones where two messages play in either ear

Where does selective attention occur?

sensory and stm

Stroop task (CL3): task & results, implication

Participants report the ink colors of color names displayed. When ink colors and names contradict each other, stroop effect is observed and rt increases.

What is the stroop effect?

the delay in reaction time due to contradicting stimuli

How can one overcome stroop effect?

practice, focus on first or last letter of word

How does something become automatic?

repeated practice

Benefits of automaticity

faster, unconscious, doesn't require attention

disadvantages of automaticity

action slips and mind wandering

What are action slips?

unattended auto actions that are inappropriate for current situation

Hemineglect: What is this syndrome? From the perspective of attentional mechanisms, what
seems to be happening?

impairment in directing attention to half of perceptual world

What is Decay

the loss of information from memory

Brown & Peterson (CL4): experimental design & task, results, their interpretation

participants attempt to remember trigram of letters after doing distraction (subtraction) task. ability to remember trigram decreased with longer distraction task

Significance of Brown & Peterson study

info fades from stm if it can't be rehearsed

Waugh & Norman (probe digit) study, results & implications

participants heart list of sixteen digits, either one or four per second, had to remember which digit came after displayed digit

Significance of Waugh & Norman

interference (retroactive) is the main cause of forgetting from stm

Keppel & Underwood (thoughts on Brown-Peterson),

performance decreases on later trials due to proactive interference

Retroactive Interference (RI)

newer material interferes with recollection of older items

Proactive Interference (PI)

older material interferes with learning new items

Release from PI (Wickens)

when pi is decreased due to change in stimulus

free recall

people recall list in any order

serial recall

people recall list in original order

primary effect

accuracy of recall for early list positions because they are rehearsed more

recency effect

accuracy of correct recall on final list items because they are still in stm

Changes in serial position effects w/development (i.e., age/grade)

children increase in rehearsal as they age and primacy effect increases

2 properties/functions of rehearsal

recycles info in stm to maintain for longer periods of time and increases likelihood of info transferring to ltm

What is the capacity of STM?

15-20 seconds

chunks, recoding

chunking info together and remembering the group

Scanning STM: Sternberg task (CL5) – experimental design & task, results &

a series of letters were presented (1-6) for rehearsal, participant indicated if probe letter was present in previous series.

Sternberg task significance

people scan stm in serial exhaustive fashion at 38ms per item

Form of information in STM (i.e., types of codes/representations in STM)

verbal, semantic, visual, kinesthetic

Baddeley's model of working memory

Characteristics of auxiliary systems (phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad)

low level processing, domain specific, limited pool of resources, independent

Engle's model of working memory

working memory is the ability to control attention, everyone has different wm capacity

What is Broadbent's attention model?

sensory memory-blocking filter-perceptual analysis

What is the blocking filter?

blocks irrelevent info based on physical features

What is Treisman's attenuation model?

sensory memory-filter-dictionary

What is the dictionary?

blocks irrelevent info based on psychological info

What is Johnston and Heinz multimode model?

sensory memory-early filter-perceptual analysis-late filter

What is the early filter?

based on physical features

What is the late filter?

based on meaning, requires more capacity, slows processing speed