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36 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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What is Attention? |
Brain's ability to self-regulate input from the environment not a sponge that soaks everything up, nor is it a reactive machine that responds to everything that’s out there Brain responds to selective or purposeful way to content from environment |
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In psychology, what are the two senses of Attention? |
1. Sustained Attention (Alertness: Problem of vigilance: performance declines over a long watch) 2. Selective Attention |
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What are the three main components of Selective Attention? |
1. Limited in the number of stimuli we can process 2. Attend to one stimulus at the expense of others 3. People as limited capacity systems: don't treat all stimuli equally |
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Who is the Cocktail Party Problem, and who studied it? |
Selective ability to follow one conversation out of larger acoustic background.Not a matter of loudest or closest voice
Cherry (1953) |
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What did Cherry ask when considering this phenomenon? |
1. what happens to unattended conversations? 2. How far do they get into the system and 3. how much do we extract from those messages |
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What is Dichotic Listening and Shadowing? |
Cherry invented this experiment to test unattended messages “shadowing” refers to process of repeating message as you hear it Two ears are referred to as two sources: channel means anything that carries information |
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What were Cherry's five findings for the unattended channel? |
1. No memory for unattended message
2. Switch from English to German: not noticed 3. Switch from male to female: noticed 4. Reversed speech: “something queer” 5. Switch from voice to 400 cps pure tone: noticed |
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What were Cherry's two main conclusions? |
1. Only superficial (physical) features perceived 2. Semantic content not analysed (language, meaning) - Semantic meaning requires focal attention |
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Who came up with the distinction labeled Preattentive processes vs. focal attention? |
(Neisser, 1967) |
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What is Cherry's Binaural Presentation? |
both ears receive both messages, same voice, differ only in content
Very difficult! |
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Is Source Localisation (cues that allows us to localise sound in space) helped or hindered by binaural tasks? |
Hindered! We can selectively attend easily from one stimulus or cue to the next, but we get terribly confused by having to rely on two messages (delivered in the same way) at once |
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What is one major criticism of Cherry's work? |
Cherry’s method confounds perception and memory…we can’t uniquely attribute results to perception or memory. |
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What is Broadbent's (1958) filter theory? |
basic claim “attention acts as selective filter which stops brain from being overloaded by stimuli”
info moves through the senses, then into the short term store whereby the selective filter to selects which stimuli are included (and which stimuli are excluded) - then (more processing in the model but) basically to short-term store (STS) |
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In Broadbent's Split-Span experiments (recalling info in left-right ear pairs, or one ear followed by the other ear, which participants do better on) - why is STS theory important to understanding the properties of Filter? (filter switching times and way the filter behaves dynamically) |
Broadbent argued this was evidence of filter interacting with brief memory store and gave us insights into temporal properties (switching time properties) of the filter
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What was George Miller famous for? |
magic properties of 7 + or – 2
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What is Echoic Memory? |
Acoustic Trace: Can hold that sound in system for up to one second after it lapses Same as Iconic Memory (e.g. brief fragile like seeing lightning flash), but for the auditory system. |
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Why did Broadbent argue the STS was organised peripherally? |
Switching Time: one part associated with left ear and holds digits presented to that ear, and contra-wise for other ear
Ear-by-ear recall needs 1 filter switch, 5 switches needed to follow temporal order Switches take time, STS trace decays |
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In Broadbent's model, does meaning occur before or after the Filter? |
After. Once it makes it through to the Limited Capacity Channel then that's supposedly where recognition happens Extraction of meaning requires access to limited capacity channel but only if stimulus is attended |
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Which experiment by Gray & Wedderburn, 1960 challenged the Broadbent's Filter theory? |
“Dear Aunt Jane” experiment Task to recall preferred order, not ear |
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How did this challenge Filter theory? |
filter theory states meaning only extracted after the filter. i.e. downstream from the filter….so how does filter (if this is the case) know how to use meaning to recall order?
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Did Broadbent's theory have the hallmarks of a good scientific theory? |
Yes. Because it was structured to be so clearly falsified means it was a good theory because it was crisp and unambiguous in its predictions |
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What did Moray find in 1959? |
Selection based on meaning not consistent with idea that meaning only extracted on the attended channel
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What was the Early and Late Selection debate? |
disagreement about the location of the filter; Late Selectionists argued filter was downstream after semantic analysis but before awareness |
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Who were the Early Selectionists? |
Treisman who worked closely with Broadbent at Cambridge |
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Who were the Late Selectionists? |
Deutsch and Deutsch, and Norman
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How did Treisman (1961) modify Broadbent's model, with the Attenuation Model? |
Broadbent's filter completely blocks unattended stimuli, Treisman's partly blocks (attenuates) it
"attenuation” loosely equivalent to turning the volume down; *attenuated stimuli supposedly don't make it to awareness, EXCEPT for Highly salient stimuli (name), semantically related material (Dear Aunt Jane contents of message could be predictable) gets through filter, shifts attention |
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What was the evidence for Early Selection ? Treisman & Geffen (1967) |
Dichotic listening experiment with the "tap" People more accurate on attended channel and while they were not as good on unattended channel, it was not a zero result (i.e. detected fewer embedded words). Except, when the "tap" on the unattended channel changed voice, then participants did much better with the unattended channel |
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How did this experiment emulate Cherry's dichotic experiments? |
to emulate Cherry's experiment where he used memory of the contents of the unattended channel to assess what was perceived, experimenters got feedback of participants' perception with an instant "tap"
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What does LTM stand for other than Long Term Memory? |
Semantic Analysis |
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How did Deutsch and Deutsch, and Norman modify the Filter theory for Late Selection? |
filter situated AFTER stimuli had undergone semantic analysis
LS account that the memory system can be activated in two ways 1. Bottom up (LTM), 2. Top down (Pertinence). |
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What is the Top Down process? |
system is cognitively controlled intentional activation that depends on goals, expectations- leading to variable that Norman calls ‘pertinence’ (i.e. meaning whatever is relevant to what you are doing at the time, trying to make sense of or to process).
pertinence also selects certain stimuli…so if I’m attempting to attend to the contents of the right hand channel then that becomes pertinent (left channel becomes less pertinent) |
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What is evidence for Late Selection? (McKay, 1973) |
Argued semantic processing will occur regardless of whether you are attending it or not
performance was systematically biased by what was presented on unattended channel!! Bank= attended channel River or Money= Unattended channel |
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What did Von Wright, Anderson & Stenman (1975) study? |
Classically conditioned Galvanic skin response (GSR) with a semantic category, eg. fruit words - "banana" |
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Was "peach" a classically conditioned word? |
No. This was a crucial part of the experiment because if semantic category elicits GSR on the unattended channel, then we know that the conditioned response is not just the acoustic properties of the stimulus |
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What did Von Wright, Anderson & Stenman (1975) find? |
two passages of speech were presented, one shadowed and the other ignored, but in the ignored passage were embedded words of that semantic category and NEVERTHELESS, those words elicited a GSR.
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If semantic analysis occurs before the filter, how does Late Selection explain what gets through to awareness/consciousness? |
all stimuli activate semantic representations in LTM, but need to be selected by pertinence to get into consciousness
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