Lecture 13

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, theoretical models, and experimental phenomena related to attention and cognitive capacity from the lecture transcript.

Ergonomics

The discipline of designing tools, objects, and environments to match human physical shapes and cognitive capacities.

Attention

The point where cognition begins, involving the selection of specific information for further processing while rejecting other information.

Focused attention

A state of attention deployed when an individual is assigned to focus on and perform a specific task.

Diffuse attention

A relaxed state of attention with no specific assigned task, where an individual takes in an entire scene.

Spotlight theory of attention

An early theory conceiving attention as an internal eye or spotlight that moves over spatial locations.

Object based theory of attention

A theory proposing that attention is directed at specific objects in the foreground while blurring out the background.

Inattentional blindness

The failure to notice or process unexpected visual stimuli because cognitive processing is limited and focused elsewhere.

Inattentional blindness blindness

The phenomenon where individuals are blind to their own inattentional blindness, overestimating their ability to notice visual details.

Selection for action

A theory proposed by Alan Allport in the late nineties suggesting that attention is limited because humans can only execute a limited number of physical actions.

Limited cognitive capacity

The dominant theory stating that cognitive processing is limited because the brain possesses a restricted pool of processing resources.

Early selection

Attentional filtering that occurs early in the processing chain based solely on physical characteristics like pitch or noise type.

Late selection

Attentional filtering that takes place late in processing, occurring only after the meaning of the stimuli has been recognized.

Dichotic listening task

An experimental task where participants wear stereo headphones playing different auditory messages to each ear and are instructed to attend to one channel.

Shadowing

The act of repeating back out loud the message heard in the designated ear during a dichotic listening task.

Cocktail party effect

The phenomenon of hearing one's own name in a noisy room; objective research by Wood and Cowan shows it occurs only 35% of the time under controlled conditions.

Flexible locus of selection

Nili Lavie's proposal that the point of attentional selection shifts between early and late depending on task difficulty and available spare cognitive capacity.

Pop out

A phenomenon in visual search where a visual target with a single unique feature is detected immediately without effort.

Preattentive process

A fast visual processing stage that operates in parallel across the visual field without requiring serial attention.

Feature integration theory

Anne Treisman's theory asserting that the fundamental role of attention is to bind distinct individual features, such as color and shape, into unified objects.

Illusory conjunctions

Perceptual errors occurring when visual features detach and recombine incorrectly because attention is divided or limited.

Change blindness

A visual phenomenon demonstrated by Rensink and O'Regan where large changes in a scene go unnoticed when obscured by a brief flash or interruption.

Endogenous attention

Voluntary, internal, and controlled attentional allocation directed by the individual.

Exogenous attention

Involuntary, automatic, and stimulus-driven attentional capture triggered by external events.