attention

selection

concept that says attending to something causes the object of attention to be selected apart from the rest of the unattended objects

noise

irrelevant information in the environment acts as that can make it difficult to identify and attend to important information

automatic processes

involuntary, captures attention; are fast and efficient

controlled processes

consciously guide attn to objects of interest; are slower

salience

thing that naturally pops out to you ex

auto pilot

a task which used to required a great deal of conscious effort to perform has become automatic through practice

Michael Posner

psychologist responsible for idea of spotlight process for visual attn

spotlight model

you only focus on only part of the environment at a time

objects within the spotlight

faster + more accurate rxn time

contexual cues

out attentional spotlight is automatically attracted to ________ ____

Colin Cherry

simulated the cocktail party effect

auditory

filter models are readily applied to understand attention

visual

spotlight model is readily applied to understand attention

Donarld Broadbent

proposed the single filter model

single filter model

suggests that imput we filter as important goes on for further processing

dichotic listening paradigm

two different messages put in diff ears; one is attended and the other is barely processed

Von Wright

by combining classical conditioning with the dichotic listening experiment they were able prove that ppl can respond to unattended info

breakthrough

participants are able to notice important info from an unattended stream ex

physical filter

1st filter of Treismans model

semantic filter

2nd filter of Treismans model

the stroop task

participants given colour names; have to say out loud the colour of the font

interfere

on incongruent trials of the stroop task, the automatic word-reading w colour naming peformance

proportion congruent manipulation

change the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials

high congruency tests

when the words are mostly congruent, the participants tend to focus on word reading, so when they find the rare incongruent case, they tend to trip up

low congruency test

participants find that the word reading does not help so they actively ignore the word and instead process the font colour on its own

controlled

the Stroop task shows that automatic processes can be consciously

set size

of items to search through to find target

set size effect

inc of set size = inc difficulty to find target

pop-out effect

something about the target makes it stand out no matter the set size ex

conjunction search task

identifuing a target by considering 2 or more features; unable to use one simple feature to find the target

single feature search

when target can be found by relying on just one feature

context cueing

when target can be found more easily based on context ex

top-down processing

involves perception via our prior experiences, heuristics, and biases (your past experiences suddenly "fill in the blanks" about something you perceive).

bottom-up processing

involves perception via sensory information and stimuli