10- Failures of Attention

In Schneider and Shiffrin’s experiment, in which participants were asked to indicate whether a target stimulus was present in a series of rapidly presented “frames,” divided attention was easier

once processing had become automatic

While watching a video containing a card trick, you notice a person wearing a chicken costume in the background but your partner who watched the video with you did not see the person wearing a chicken costume. Which of these explains how your partner did not see it?

Inattentional blindness

Which of these is related to the automatic processing of tasks that are highly practiced?

Divided attention

Strayer and Johnston’s (2001) experiment involving simulated driving and the use of “hands-free” versus “handheld” cell phones found that

talking on either kind of phone impairs driving performance significantly and to the same extent

What is likely to occur if a person sustains damage to the parietal lobe of the brain?

They will experience unilateral neglect

Divided attention refers to

Allocating resources to two tasks at once

In Schneider & Shiffrin (1977), consistent mapping eventually produced

Automatic processing

In inconsistent mapping conditions, performance remained controlled because

Distractors could become targets

The Strayer & Johnston (2001) study showed that driving impairment was due to

The attentional demands of conversation

In the same study, hands-free and handheld phones

Produced equal interference

Generating words (secondary task) impaired driving more because

It required more cognitive resources

Texting while driving constitutes

Task switching

The “productivity illusion” refers to

Thinking multitasking improves efficiency

The “mere presence” effect (Ward et al., 2017) showed that

Phones impair cognition even when turned off

Inattentional blindness refers to

Not noticing visible stimuli when attention is elsewhere

The Cartwright-Finch & Lavie (2007) study found that most people

Missed the unexpected object due to attentional focus

Change blindness occurs when

Attention is directed away from the change

Using a noise mask between images increases change blindness because

It disrupts visual continuity

Unilateral neglect is typically caused by damage to

The parietal lobe

Patients with unilateral neglect

Fail to perceive one side even in mental imagery

In the “Mrs. S.” example, she

Had lost the idea of “left” entirely

Dividing attention is especially difficult when tasks

Use the same cognitive resources

Multitasking typically

Slows down performance on each task

The cost of attending to one thing is

Deprioritizing unattended information

Change blindness can occur even without competing tasks because

Attention must be allocated to detect changes