(Chapter 4) Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 4th Edition

the ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations. William James thought it was withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others

Attention

attending to one thing while ignoring others

Ex: doing math problems while not being distracted by people talking

Selective attention

one stimulus interfering with the processing of another stimulus

Ex: playing a game but being distracted by people talking

Distraction

paying attention to more than one thing at a time; can be achieved with practice, becomes more difficult or impossible when tasks are harder

Ex: playing a game while listening in on a conversation

Divided attention

a rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement

Ex: a noise attracts your attention, and you scan the scene to figure out what is happening

Attentional capture and scanning

movements of the eyes from one location or object to another

Visual scanning

The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli

Ex: At noisy parties people are able to focus on what one person is saying even if there are many conversations happening at the same time

Cocktail party effect

Model of attention which explains how it is possible to focus on one message and why information isn't taken in from the other message.

First information goes into sensory memory, which holds information for a fraction of a second. Then it is transferred to the filter which identifies the message that is being attended to based on its physical characteristics and passes only the attended message to the detector. The detector processes the information from the attended message to determine higher-level characteristics of the message, such as its meaning. Finally, this information is sent to short-term memory, which holds information for 10-30 seconds and then on to long term memory, which can hold information indefinitely

Broadbent's filter model

Another name for Broadbent's filter model because the filter restricts information flow much as the neck of a bottle restricts the flow of liquid, so the liquid escapes only slowly even though there is a large amount in the bottle.

bottleneck model

the filter eliminates the unattended information right at the BEGINNING of the flow of information (Ex: Broadbent's filter, Triesman's)

early selection model

refers to a listening task presenting different stimuli to the left and right ears, usually at the same volume. The message in the attended ear is shadowed to shift attention from the unattended ear.

Dichotic listening

Cherry's: Participants could easily shadow the message in the attended ear, but could not report what was said in the unattended ear other than the tone of voice or gender of the speaker

Moray's: When presenting the listener's name to the unattended ear, about a third of the subjects detected it

Gray and Wedderburn's: When the attended ear received the message "Dear 7 Jane," and the unattended ear received the message "9 Aunt 6," subjects reported hearing "Dear Aunt Jane"

MacKay's: In the attended ear, a subject listened to an ambiguous sentence, such as "They were throwing stones at the bank," that could be interpreted in more than one way. In the unattended ear, biasing words were presented to the other, unattended ear, biasing words were presented. Founded that the meaning of the biasing word affected the subjects' choices in a later task

Dichotic listening experiments

Triesman's proposal to replace Broadbent's filter with an attenuator. Messages enter the attenuator, then the attended message and some of the unattended messages pass to the dictionary unit (DU). The DU which analyzes the message, determines the final output of the system. Finally, information passes to memory.

The difference between Broadbent's model is that, language and meaning can also be used to separate the message. Also called "leaky filter," an early, or intermediate selection model

attenuation model of attention

represents a process that analyzes the incoming message in terms of its physical characteristics, its language and its meaning

attenuator

contains words, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold, the smallest signal strength that can barely be detected, for being activated. Words that are common or especially important have low thresholds

Dictionary unit

a type of model, like MacKay's, which proposes that most of incoming information is processed to the level of meaning before the message to be further processed is selected

late selection models of attention

refers to the amount of information people can handle and sets a limit on their ability to process incoming information

processing capacity

related to the difficulty of a task.

perceptual load

tasks, especially easy, well-practiced ones, which use up only a small amount of a person's processing capacity

low-load tasks

tasks that are difficult and perhaps not well practiced, which use more of a person's processing capacity.

high-load tasks

Forster and Lavie: subjects' task was to respond as quickly as possible when they identified a target, either X or N. Subjects pressed one key if they saw the X and another key if they saw the N, which was easy when the target was surrounded by just one type of letter. When surrounded by different letters, reaction time diminished. When a task-irrelevant stimulus flashed next to the display, responding slowed for the easy task more than for the hard task.

Processing capacity and perceptual load experiment

Lavie's theory: if you are carrying out a hard, high-load task, no processing capacity remains, and you are less likely to be distracted, but if you are carrying out an easy, low-load task, the processing capacity that remains is available to process task-irrelevant stimuli

Load theory of attention

a situation in which a task-irrelevant stimulus are difficult to ignore, because it is very powerful ( a loud siren, indicating fire)

Stroop effect

the area you are looking at

Central vision

everything off to the side to what you are looking at

Peripheral vision

each time you briefly pause to look at something you make a ________

fixation

when you move your eye to observe something else you are making a rapid, jerky movement from one fixation to the next, called a ________

saccadic eye movement

the physical properties of the stimulus, such as color, contrast, or movement. Bottom-up processing

Stimulus salience

when attention due to stimulus salience causes an involuntary shift of attention

attentional capture

Determining how saliency influences the way we scan a scene typically involves analyzing characteristics such as color, orientation, and intensity at each location in the scene and then combining these values to create a _______.

Parkhurst determined that fixations are more likely on high-saliency, or lighter, areas, and after the first few fixations, scanning begins to be influenced by top-down processing

Saliency map

Scanning can be based on _________, a form of top-down processing. A person focuses on aspects of a scene that have meaning to them, or on objects where knowledge about of what is contained in the typical scene should be, or in places where this knowledge is violated (a printer in a kitchen)

cognitive factors

a sequence of fixations which refers to a situation in which people are shifting their attention from one place to another as they are doing things, such as moving through the environment, called scanning based on ________

task demands

shifting attention from one place to another while keeping the eyes stationary

Covert attention

shifting attention from one place to another

by moving the eyes

Overt attention

used to determine whether presenting a cue indicating where a test stimulus will appear enhances the processing of the target, using covert attention. Usually subjects are to maintain focus on a + on a display, with cues to tell them where to shift their attention, but not their eyes.

Precueing

Posner: Subjects first saw an arrow cue indicating on which side of the display they should focus their attention. Task was to press a key as rapidly as possible when a target square was presented off to the side. Subjects reacted to the square more rapidly when their attention was focused on the location where the signal was to appear. Results showed that information processing is more effective at the place where attention is directed. Gave rise to the idea that attention is like a spotlight or zoom lens that improves processing when directed toward a particular location

Egly's : As subjects kept their eyes on the +, one end

of a rectangle was briefly highlighted. This was the

cue signal that indicated where a target, a dark square would probably appear. Subjects' task was to press a button when the target was presented anywhere on the display, with reaction time recorded. Results founded that reaction time was faster when the target was presented on the same object.

Precueing experiments

The faster responding that occurs when enhancement spreads within an object

Same-object advantage

Subject are required to carry out two tasks simultaneously. One, holding information about target stimuli in memory and two, paying attention to a series of "distractor" stimuli and determining whether one of the target stimuli is present among these distractor stimuli.

divided attention experiment

Schneider and Shiffrin: The subject was shown a memory set like consisting of one to four characters called target stimuli. The memory set was followed by rapid presentation of 20 "test frames," each of which contained distractors. On half of the trials, one of the frames contained a target stimulus from the memory set, which subjects were asked if was present. A new memory set was presented on each trial, so the targets changed from trial to trial, followed by new test frames.

Subject's performance improved significantly after many trials. The results founded that practice made it possible for subjects to divide their attention to deal with all of the target and test items simultaneously.

divided attention experiments

a type of processing that occurs without intention (it happens automatically without the person intending to do it) and at a cost of only some of a person's cognitive resources.

automatic processing

not attending to something that is clearly visible. people can be unaware of clearly visible stimuli if they aren't directing their attention to them

inattentional blindness

Cartwright-Finch and Lavie: A cross display is presented for five trials. On each trial, one arm of the cross is slightly longer than the other. The subject's task is to indicate which arm (horizontal or vertical) is longer. On the sixth trial, the subjects carry out the same task, but a small square or other geometric object is included in the display. After the sixth trial, subjects are asked whether they saw anything different than before. Out of 20 subjects, only 2 (10 percent) reported that they had seen the object.

Simons and Chabris's: Observers were told to count the number of passes in a small basketball game, a task that focused their attention on the team wearing white. After about 45 seconds, one of two events occurred: Either a woman carrying an umbrella or a person in a gorilla suit walked

through the "game," an event that took 5 seconds. Nearly half of the observers—46 percent—failed to report that they saw the woman or the gorilla. Showed attention can affect perception within a dynamic scene and demonstrated that when observers are attending to one sequence of events, they can fail to notice another event, even when it is right in front of them.

inattentional blindness experiments

difficulty in detecting changes in scenes

change blindness

the process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object.

binding

The question of how an object's individual features become bound together

binding problem

explains how binding occurs by proposing two stages of processing, preattentive processing and focused attention; the basic idea is that objects

are analyzed into their features and that attention is necessary to combine these features to create perception of an object

supported by Illusory conjunction, visual search, and neuropsychology experiments; uses mostly bottom-up processing because knowledge is usually not involved, but some top-down processing can come into play

feature integration theory

(feature integration theory) the first step in processing an image of an object, in which objects are analyzed into separate features, such as color (red), shape (round), and movement (rolling to the right). They exist independently of one another at this stage of processing.

preattentive stage

(feature integration theory) "free-floating" features are combined in this second stage, and we perceive an object.

focused attention stage

combinations of features from different stimuli. For example, a small blue circle and a large green square might be seen as a large blue square and a small green circle.

illusory conjunctions

people with this have an inability to focus attention on individual objects, or combine features correctly, and thus cannot perform a conjunction search.

Balint's syndrome

something we do anytime we look for an object among a number of other objects

visual search

A type of visual search for a single feature; "horizontal"

feature search

A type of visual search for a combination of two or more features in the same stimulus; "horizontal and green"

conjunction search

a spatial map of visual stimuli on the visual cortex

each point on a visual stimulus causes activity at a specific location on the visual cortex, and points next to each other on the stimulus cause activity at points next to each other on the visual cortex

topographic map