6 - Determinants

Question 1

What is a top down goal? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 1

Choosing what we pay attention to e.g. looking for a taxi

Question 2

What is a bottom up goal? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 2

Attention drifting onto something else e.g. looking at colourful signs while looking for a taxi

Question 3

What are the characteristics of a top down goal? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 3

• Goal driven
• Endogenous
• Attentional control
• Executive functions

Question 4

What are the characteristics of a bottom up goal? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 4

• Stimulus driven
• Exogenous
• Involuntary attention
• Reflexive attention

Question 5

Who devised biased competition theory? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 5

Desimone and Duncan 1995

Question 6

What is biased competition theory? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 6

Top down control mechanisms and bottom up sensory driven mechanisms compete to produce and output to response/memory systems

Question 7

What two characteristics are attributed with biased competition theory? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 7

• Attentional capture

- Abrupt onset

Question 8

What is attentional capture? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 8

Involuntary action that takes your attention somewhere else

Question 9

What is abrupt onset? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 9

Something that suddenly appears e.g. movement of a stimulus

Question 10

What are salient colour singletons? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 10

The odd one out of a set of stimuli

Question 11

What is meant by salient? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 11

How much does the surrounding stimuli differ from the stimuli in question

Question 12

What is meant by singleton? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 12

Something that is different from all around it

Question 13

What did Theeuwes (1992) find in regards to the singleton attentional capture task? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 13

• Colour increases reaction time in finding the singletons

- Attention cannot be top down because it is not only focused on shapes

Question 14

What is the stimulus driven selection model? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 14

• Sweep across the field (bottom up) to calculate local salience
• Attention then goes to the place of highest salience
• Judge what we want to pay attention to
• Shift salience if needs be

Question 15

What does stimulus drive selection only take place in? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 15

Attentional window

Question 16

What did Folk and Remington (1992) state about contingent capture? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 16

• Capture is not stimulus driven
• Attention can only be captured by a stimulus that is relevant to our goals
• Involuntary attention may be a side effect of our goals

Question 17

What did Yantis et al state about abrupt onset? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 17

Only abrupt onset can produce stimulus driven capture

Question 18

What did Franconeri & Simons (2003) find in relation to abrupt onset? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 18

• Moving stimuli also capture attention
• Stimuli that move towards you capture attention
• Stimuli that move away from you do not capture attention

Question 19

What did Gibson and Kelsey (1998) find in relation to display wide settings? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 19

• P’s will sit at a computer and react to a stimulus even though they have not been instructed to do so

Question 20

What does a display wide setting suggest? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 20

• Humans anticipate change

- Creates an attentional setting for something to happen

Question 21

What do mainstream models of attention not account for? (Determinants Cognitive)

Answer 21

The meaning of objects having the ability to capture our attention