Cognitive Psychology: Attention and Visual Search

A collection of vocabulary flashcards relevant to the concepts of attention and visual search in cognitive psychology.

Cocktail Party Problem

The phenomenon where unattended auditory information is processed, and individuals can detect their name in an unattended channel.

Bottom-up processing

Processing that begins with sensory input, where perception starts with the stimulus.

Top-down processing

Processing guided by higher-level mental processes, use of prior knowledge to interpret sensory information.

Early selection

Theory that attention selection occurs early in the perceptual process, filtering based on physical characteristics.

Dichotic listening task

An experimental setup where participants are presented with different auditory inputs in each ear to study attention.

Late selection

Theory that all stimuli are fully analyzed, and the relevant stimulus determines the response made.

Attentional blink

A phenomenon where a second target is often missed when presented shortly after a first target.

Covert attention

The ability to pay attention to a spatial location without directly looking at it.

Feature Integration Theory

Theory suggesting that perceptual features are encoded in parallel and attention is required for object recognition when features overlap.

Dual Path Model

A theory that suggests visual search uses both serial and parallel processing strategies, influenced by expectations.

Illusory conjunctions

Phenomena where features from multiple objects are incorrectly combined when focused attention is absent.

Selective attention

The process of focusing on particular objects in the environment for enhanced processing.