p258 attention module 5

william james

inattentional blindness

inability to percieve information outside of the spotlight of attention

change blindness

inability to detect diferences in 2 alternating flahsed images

Moray 1959

• a word would be repeated up to 30 times and not not be processed if unattended to

dichotomous listening task

Grey and Weddeburn 1960

if a meaningful narrative was played such that each successive word alternated bw ears, people would follow the narrative

• discovered late selection theories

lates selection theories

assumes that the basic meaning of an unattended stimulus is processed along w the attended stimulus (add pic)

Attenuator model (Treisman) and how it works

• there is some processing of incoming stimulus based on physical properties

• some info makes its way to the filter, it is attenuated

• meaning of the reduced signal can be identified in the dictionary unit

• interpreted info is moved into memory for storage

McKay locus of attention (1973)

• conducted another iteration of Dichotic Listening Task

• people focuses on sentences w ambiguous meaning

• unattended channelsplayed audio that would add context to sentence

• people did not rmb hearing word money

  • but their memory of audio contained “money bank” and not “riverbank”

attention load

• how much processing resources are needed to peform a given task

attention is a cognitive resource that is finite and can be…

distributed unequally across different tasks

eriksen flanker task

Lavie (1995)

• incompatible flanker only caused an increase in rxn time in ow lod, but not high load conditions

Green and Balevier 2003 experiemnt and conclusion

• Does playing video games influence people’s attention span?

• Gamers did the flanker task

• showed flanker distraction in high and low conditions

• gamers can better distribute their attention outside of the central task

automatic processing

• when task is so familiar you do not need to pay attention in order to do it

• result of practice and learning

• ex: after driving for long time you don’t need to pay attention to how hard u push on gas

  • developed automaticity

is reading a familiar automatic process

• yes

• may need attend to fully understand, but individual words can pop out without us paying attention

Divided attention

Drews et al.