PSY 3217: Ch. 5 - Paying Attention

Selective Attention

ability to focus on one message and ignore all others

Filtering

process of selecting among multi stimuli to filter out the unimport + keep import. Bottleneck

Dichotic listening

person listens to 2 message present simultaneously

Shadowing task

repeats the word they have just heard

General finding for Cherry’s dichotic listening

participants can only report the gross physical characteristics of unattended msg

Broadbent’s ESM

attention acts as simple on-off, only allows one msg at a time. B4 incoming info is analyzed for meaning it is filtered.

Sensory memory

holds all incoming info for a brief period of time (transfers to next stage)

Filter

identifies attended msg based on physical characteristics of the msg

Detector

processes all info to determine higher-lvl characteristics of the msg (meaning)

Short term memory

receives output of detector (applies in other places as well)

What Broadbent’s ESM couldn’t explain

why participants name get through on attended channel, cocktail party, and why participants can shadow meaningful msgs that switch from one ear to another

Dear Aunt Jane task

(dear seven jane, and aunt, participant shadows dear aunt jane)

Triesman’s Attenuated Filter Model

What is processed: meaningful task-relevant information is processed further

Attenuator

analyze incoming msg in terms of phys characteristics, lng, meaning. Attended is attenuated: let through at full, unattnuated is attenuated: let through at weaker strength

Lexicon

contains words, each of which has a threshold for being activated (common=low, uncommon=high)

Ear Switching task

switch content between attended and unattended ear

Thresholds

low own name, high rutabaga, mid boat (unused)

McKay’s Late Selection Theory

short-term mem is the bottleneck (selection doesn’t occur ‘til ALL info has been fully analyzed for meaning)

Word task

They were throwing stones at the bank; unattended heard river/money, meaning of the biasing word affected participants’ choice. Chose the sentence that was closest to the meaning of msg.

Load Theory of attention

low-load tasks use few cog resources leave them avail fo processing unattended task-irre stimuli, HL use all of the person’s cognitive resources and don’t leave any

Stroop effect

cant avoid attention to the word, name interferes w/ ability to name ink color

Automatic processing

processing that occurs obligatory when specific stimulus is present

Controlled Processing

intentional processing focus on achieving a specific goal

Automaticity

do a task without thinking about it because you have practiced it many times