What are the main topics of Focused Auditory Attention
- Studies of auditory selective attention: dichotic listening task, and the Cocktail party phenomenon
- Bottleneck models
–> Broadbent’s Filter model
–> Treisman’s attenuation model
–> Deutsch & Deutsch’s late selection model
–> early vs late selection
–> flexible bottleneck
What is the dichotic listening task?
- subject is fitted with headphones and played different streams of messages
- 2 different messages are played (one in each ear) and they are told to focus only on one ear and shadow the message
- the problem is that she will switch focus to the other ear because the message will make more sense contextually (more continuity in the sentence)
What were Cherry’s findings in the dichotic listening task?
When asked about the unattended ear’s message, subjects did not notice it was foreign speech or reversed speech - indicating that the unattended information received minimal processing.
They noticed if it changed voice –> processing of the physical characteristics, not the meaning.
What were Morey’s findings, and how do they fit with Cherry’s findings?
Morey: ‘identification paradox’ and the ‘cocktail party phenomenon’
- in the unattended message, subjects did not notice repetition of the same word 35 times
- but they noticed if their own name was mentioned in the unattended ear
- this is inconsistent with Cherry’s findings that the unattended message receives minimal processing (processes only physical characteristics, not information)
What do the bottleneck models of attention all assume?
They all assume that attention is selective and assume the multistore model of memory architecture
- all models assume transfer of information from sensory register to STM
- sensory register has a large capacity; STM store is limited (bottleneck)
What are the 3 bottleneck models of attention?
Broadbent’s filter model
Treisman’s attenuation model
Deutsch and Deutsch late selection model
Discuss Broadbent’s filter model
- stimuli gain access in parallel to a sensory register
- the selective filter is assumed to be ‘all or none’ and blocks processing of unattended information from accessing the limited-capacity STM store
- attended input now in the STM undergoes semantic processing –> whereas unattended messaging is only processed in terms of physical characteristics [CONSISTENT WITH CHERRY, INCONSISTENT WITH MOREY]
Discuss Treisman’s attenuation model
- not an all or one filter –> an attenuator turns down the amount of processing of unattended information (therefore bottleneck is not all or none)
- the thresholds of context-appropriate stimuli are lower (top down processing can lower the threshold of conscious awareness, leading to breakthroughs)
–> CONSISTENT WITH DICHOTIC LISTENING TASK (swapping ears to complete the sentence with meaningful information to that context) AND THE COCKTAIL PARTY PHENOMENON
Discuss Deutsch & Deutsch’s late selection model
- no attenuator - only the idea of different thresholds are necessary
- the bottleneck is later (not in processing, but instead when you are selecting for action)
- therefore information is analysed fully (physical, semantic) even for the unattended message
SO THINK?
- the difference between Treisman and Deutch’s model is the location of the bottleneck (early or late)
- treisman and riley’s experiment involving tapping along a response to a certain word that could appear in the attended or unattended channel showed that Treisman’s is more likely because target detection was worse in unattended message
Discuss the flexible bottleneck view
Unattended message is not always processed fully to the level of meaning.
Experiment:
- presented with a list of word dichotically, and instructed to detect a target (member of a semantic category) while a non-target word was presented at the same time
- some target words were ambiguous (had multiple meanings) and the non target word could bias teh interpretation of the target word (chuch-ORGAN, paper-ORGAN, kidney-ORGAN)
- in the focused attention condition: no effect of type of non-target on target detection (non-targets were not processed to the level of meaning)
- in the divided attention target detection, they were biased
What are the main talking points of Divided Attention?
- Multitasking
- Practice
- Automaticity (Shiffrin and Schneider’s theory + Stroop task)
Are high multitaskers better at shifting attention?
Inconsistent results
What is task-switching
Task-switching is the shifting function of central executive
Experiment
- asked to classify a stimulus on each trial (which have letters and numbers)
- on some trials asked to classify the stimulus on basis of the letter (consonant or vowel) or number (even/odd)
Findings
- people are faster if they repeat the type of trial (letter-letter or number-number are faster than letter-number or number-letter)
- called a SWITCH COST
Divided attention: dual task performance
What determines how well we can perform two tasks at the same time?
- individual difference in media use?
- the degree of similarity of the two tasks: similar tasks interfere
–> similar stimulus modality (visual and visual) interferes more than dissimilar stimulus modality (visual and auditory)
–> similar response modality interferes in the same way
- practice and automaticity (with practice, task becomes automatic / easier to perform
Discuss automaticity
With practice, tasks become automatic or easier to perform
Automatic processes are fast, require little attentional capacity, unavailable to consciousness, unavoidable (stroop task), inflexible (once learned, difficult to modify)
Shiffrin and Schneider’s memory search experiment
- asked to memorize a memory set
- have to identify if the display set contained a target from memory set
- two training conditions: consistent (target set and distractor set do not overlap from trial - memory set is numbers only, distractors are letters only) or varied (target on one trail may be a distractor in the next trial)
Findings: development of automaticity under the training of Consistent Mapping compared to varied mapping where there was serial search therefore longer time taken to respond
What does Logan’s instance theory tell us
Automaticity is memory retrieval - how does automaticity develop
Encounters are stored as a memory episode, practice allows a direct access retrieval of solution from a memory, rather than processing the rules of the algorithm
