PSYC 213 - Chapter 4, Attention

What is attention?

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

What are the kinds of attentions?

-Selective attention: Attending to one thing while ignoring others

-Divided attention: Paying attention to more than one thing at the same time

-Attentional capture and scanning: A noise grabbing your attention and scanning the scene to figure out what happened

In dichotic listening, within the shadowing task, does the participant really process what is said?

-They do not remember the unattended message

• However know a message was there and could report the speaker’s gender

  • Concludes that the unattended ear does process at some level

How does Broadbent’s filter model relate to filtering attention?

-Filtering happens early (after sensory memory holds info)

• The filter blocks message before their content is analyzed for meaning

-The filter identifies the message by its physical characteristics → passes it on for higher-level, meaningful characteristics

What are the limitations of Broadbent’s filter model with early selection?

-Couldn’t explain the cocktail party effect

-Why people can successfully keep shadowing a meaningful message even when it switches from one eat to another mid sentence

What is Treisman’s attenuation model?

-Intermediate selection model

• Attended/unattended messages can be separated early in processing, but full selection can happen later

-Attenuator analyzes incoming messages for physical characteristics, language, meaning, not just physical location

-Both unattended/attended passes through, attended one is just stronger

What is Mackay’s design for filtering attention?

What is processing capacity?

-How much info a person can handle at any given moment

What is perceptual load?

-How difficult a given task is

• High-load (difficult) tasks consume more of a person’s processing capacity

• Low load (easy) tasks consume less - leaving capacity available for other things

What is the Stroop test?

-The written meaning of a word interferes w/ your ability to name the colour of the ink it’s shown in

• Most people slow down and make more errors than when naming the colours of plain rectangles

  • Demonstrates that reading a word's meaning is so automatic that people cannot simply choose to ignore it, even when it actually interferes w/ the task at hand

What is the load theory of attention?

What are the kinds of eye movements?

-Saccades: Rapid eye movements of the eyes from one location to another

-Fixations: brief pauses on points of interest, between saccades

• Recorded and studied by using eye trackers

What is stimulus salience & its relation to bottom-up processing?

-Areas that stand out, through colour, motion, and contrast

-Captures attention automatically, driven by the stimulus itself

What is a scene schema and its relation to top down processing?

-Knowledge of what a scene typically contains guides fixations from one relevant area to the next

What is precueing?

-Attention can be directed to a location w/o moving the eyes there

• Participants respond faster to a light appearing at an expected location than at an unexpected one - even w/ their eyes held fixated on a central point