5 - Selection

Question 1

What is early selection? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 1

The filtering out of irrelevant information at an early stage, before understanding the meaning

Question 2

What is late selection? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 2

All signals reaching the meaning level, from there the information is filtered

Question 3

What are the names of the early selection models? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 3

• Cocktail party effect
• Dichotic listening task
• Broadbent filter theory
• Treisman attenuation model

Question 4

What is the cocktail party effect? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 4

• Cherry 1953
• You are able to focus on the conversation only, despite other noise in the room
• When you hear stimuli, such as your name, you are able to pick up on it

Question 5

What is the dichotic listening task? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 5

Ignoring input into one ear and speaking the input from the other ear

Question 6

What was found with the dichotic listening task? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 6

• No difficulty in completion
• On surprise question on the unattended ear, P’s could report physic characteristics about the voice
• Content, reverse speech or type of language of the unattended ear was not detected

Question 7

What is Broadbent’s filter theory (1958)? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 7

• Early selection model
• Filtering occurs before incoming stimuli are analysed to the semantic level
• Surface features analysed, but meaning is not

Question 8

What are the model stages behind filter theory? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 8

• Message
• Sensory store
• Filter (attended message)
• Detector
• Memory

Question 9

What is the function of the sensory store? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 9

Holds information for a short period of time

Question 10

What is the function of the filter? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 10

Analyses messages based on physical characteristics e.g. tone of voice

Question 11

What is the function of the detector? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 11

Information is processed to determine understanding

Question 12

What is the function of short term memory? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 12

Holds information for general processing

Question 13

What issue did Moray (1959) find in regards to early selection? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 13

P’s heard their name in the unattended ear during dichotic listening

Question 14

What issue did Triesman (1960) find in regards to early selection? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 14

Bilinguals influenced by the unattended ear if it was in L₂

Question 15

Why did Triesman create the attenuation model and what was it? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 15

• Attempted to overcome conflicting evidence
• Unattended messages are attenuated rather than completely lost
• Words need to meet a certain threshold of signal in order to be detected

Question 16

What are the models behind late selection? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 16

• Mackay (1973)
• Response competition task
• Negative priming

Question 17

What did Mackay (1973) find in regards to late selection? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 17

• Ambiguous statement in attended ear
• Bias word in unattended ear
• When asked questions, they tended to use the bias word in the ambiguous statement

Question 18

What is the response competition task? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 18

Incongruent distractors in an irrelevant location slows reaction times, meaning the distractor has been identified

Question 19

What is negative priming? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 19

P’s were asked to ignore something and then respond to the same stimuli, processing slows down

Question 20

Who devised load theory? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 20

Lavie (1994)

Question 21

What did load theory suggest? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 21

• Both early and late selection are possible
• Depends on the availability of perceptual capacity
• Perceptual capacity is limited

Question 22

How does load theory explain early selection? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 22

Tasks with high perceptual load will exhaust capacity, everything else will be ignored

Question 23

How does load theory explain late selection? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 23

Tasks with low perceptual load leaves space in capacity, so irrelevant distractors are processed

Question 24

What did Simon and Chabris (1999) find? (Selection Cognitive)

Answer 24

• Inattention blindness
• Psychological lack of attention
• Gorilla advert