Cognitive Psychology: Attention

Attention

The cognitive process of selectively focusing on certain aspects of the environment while ignoring others.

Endogenous Control (Top-Down Processes)

Goal-directed attention driven by internal factors, such as intentions and expectations.

Exogenous Control (Bottom-Up Processes)

Stimulus-driven attention captured by external factors, such as salient or unexpected stimuli.

Fixations

Brief periods (200-300ms) when the eyes are stationary, allowing information acquisition.

Saccades

Rapid eye movements between fixations.

Selective Attention

The ability to focus on a specific stimulus or task while filtering out irrelevant information.

Divided Attention

The ability to attend to and process multiple tasks or stimuli simultaneously.

Shadowing

A technique used in dichotic listening tasks, where participants repeat aloud the message presented in one ear while ignoring the other.

Cocktail Party Effect

The phenomenon of noticing one's own name or other personally relevant information even when attending to a different conversation.

Change Blindness

The failure to notice significant changes in a visual scene when attention is directed elsewhere.

Inattention Blindness

The failure to perceive an object or event that is clearly visible because attention is focused on something else.

Stroop Task

A test that demonstrates the interference of automatic processes (e.g., reading) with attentional tasks (e.g., color naming).

Visual Search

The process of scanning a visual scene to locate a specific target.

Disjunctive Search

A visual search task where the target differs from the distractors by a single feature (e.g., color, shape).

Conjunctive Search

A visual search task where the target is defined by a combination of features (e.g., red and square).

Feature Integration Theory

Treisman's theory proposing two stages of attention: distributed attention and focused attention.

Attentional Costs

The performance decrements experienced when attempting to perform multiple tasks simultaneously due to limited attentional resources.

Perfect Time-Sharing

The theoretical ability to perform two tasks simultaneously without any performance decrement.

Spotlight Theory of Attention

A theory that suggests attention operates like a spotlight, illuminating a specific region of the visual field.

Object-Based Attention

The theory that attention is directed to objects rather than specific locations in space.

Hemispatial Neglect

A neurological disorder, often caused by damage to the right parietal lobe, characterized by a lack of awareness of stimuli on the left side of space.