Attention and its Limits

These flashcards cover key vocabulary and concepts related to the study of attention, including definitions and examples important for understanding selective and divided attention.

Selective Attention

The process of focusing on a particular object in the environment for a certain period of time while ignoring others.

Cocktail Party Phenomenon

The ability to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, often experienced in crowded environments.

Broadbent's Bottleneck

A theory that suggests a filter limits the amount of information processed, allowing only some to pass through for further processing.

Dichotic Listening Experiment

A method used in psychological testing where different audio inputs are presented to each ear, often to study selective attention.

Semantic Processing

The process of understanding and interpreting the meaning of words and sentences in context, even when presented in an unattended manner.

Treisman’s Attenuation Model

A model that suggests information is not completely filtered out but instead attenuated, allowing for some processing of unattended stimuli.

Late Bottleneck

A processing limitation that occurs later in the information processing stream, where only relevant information is allowed to influence response.

Extensive Processing

A level of cognitive processing that involves deeper analysis of information, often resulting in better memory retention and understanding.

Automaticity

The ability to perform tasks with little or no conscious thought as a result of practice and habit formation.

Resource Limitation Model

A model that suggests there are limited cognitive resources available for task performance, leading to trade-offs when multitasking.

Agnosia

A condition characterized by the inability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells despite having no significant sensory deficits.

Orienting Attention

The process of directing cognitive resources towards specific stimuli in the environment, often compared to a spotlight or flashlight.

Multiple Resource Pools

The theory that suggests humans possess different cognitive resources for different types of processing, such as auditory and visual tasks.

Subliminal Perception

The detection of stimuli that are below the threshold of conscious awareness, influencing thoughts and behaviors without conscious recognition.

Illusory Conjunctions

Phenomena that occur when features from multiple objects are mistakenly combined, typically when attention is divided.

Cross Modal Priming

A phenomenon where exposure to one sensory modality influences response to a target stimulus in another modality.

Fixed Limits of Attention

The concept that certain thresholds exist within cognitive capacity that cannot be exceeded, though they may be flexible with practice.