Ch. 4

Question 1

Learning Objectives

Answer 1

4-1
Describe how it is possible to focus attention on just one thing, even when many other things are going on at the same time.
4-2
Describe under what conditions we can pay attention to more than one thing at a time.
4-3
Describe the “early-late” controversy as it pertains to the early and late selection models of attention.
4-4
Describe the importance of the “Dear Aunt Jane” study as it relates to the models of attention.
4-5
Explain what attention research tells us about the effect of talking on cell phones while driving a car.
4-6
Describe the cocktail party effect and how it relates to endogenous versus exogenous attention.
4-7
Differentiate between inattentional blindness and change blindness.
4-8
Evaluate the claim that we are not paying attention to a large proportion of the information in our environment.

Question 2

attention

Answer 2

Focusing on specific features, objects, or locations or on certain thoughts or activities.

the ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations.

Question 3

selective attention

Answer 3

The ability to focus on one message and ignore all others.

Question 4

distraction

Answer 4

Occurs when one stimulus interferes with attention to or the processing of another stimulus.

Question 5

divided attention

Answer 5

The ability to pay attention to, or carry out, two or more different tasks simultaneously.

the ability to divide attention depends on several factors, including practice and the difficulty of the task.

Divided Attention Becomes More Difficult When Tasks Are Harder

Question 6

attentional capture

Answer 6

A rapid shifting of attention, usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement.

Question 7

visual scanning

Answer 7

Movement of the eyes from one location or object to another.

Question 8

filter model of attention

Answer 8

Model of attention that proposes a filter that lets attended stimuli through and blocks some or all of the unattended stimuli.

Donald Broadbent (1958)

This model, which introduced the flow diagram to cognitive psychology, proposed that information passes through the following stages

1. Sensory memory holds all the incoming information for a fraction of a second and then transfers all of it to the filter.
2. The filter identifies the message that is being attended to based on its physical characteristics and lets only this attended message pass through to the detector in the next stage. All the other messages are filtered out.
3. The detector processes the information from the attended message to determine higher-level characteristics of the message, such as its meaning. Because only the important, attended information has been let through the filter, the detector processes all the information that enters it.
4. The output of the detector is sent to short-term memory, which holds information for 10 to 15 seconds and also transfers information into long-term memory, which can hold information indefinitely.

Broadbent’s model is called an early selection model because the filter eliminates the unattended information right at the beginning of the flow of information.

Question 9

dichotic listening

Answer 9

The procedure of presenting one message to the left ear and a different message to the right ear.

experiment done by Colin Cherry (1953).

dichotic refers to presenting different stimuli to the left and right ears.

The participant’s task in this experiment was to focus on the message in one ear, called the attended ear, and to repeat what they heard aloud. This procedure of repeating the words as they are heard is called shadowing

participants could easily shadow a spoken message presented to the attended ear, and they could report whether the unattended message was spoken by a male or female voice, they could not report what was being said in the unattended ear.

Question 10

filter

Answer 10

In Broadbent’s model of attention, the filter identifies the message that is being attended to based on its physical characteristics—things like the speaker’s tone of voice, pitch, speed of talking, and accent—and lets only this attended message pass through to the detector in the next stage

Question 11

detector

Answer 11

In Broadbent’s model of attention, the detector processes the information from the attended message to determine higher-level characteristics of the message, such as its meaning.

Question 12

early selection model

Answer 12

Model of attention that explains selective attention by early filtering out of the unattended message. In Broadbent’s early selection model, the filtering step occurs before the message is analyzed to determine its meaning.

Question 13

Neville Moray (1959)

Answer 13

Broadbent’s filter model of attention was that it provided testable predictions about selective attention.

One initial prediction was that since all the unattended messages are filtered out, we should not be conscious of information in the unattended messages.

To test this idea, Neville Moray (1959) did a dichotic listening experiment in which his participants were instructed to shadow the message presented to one ear and ignore the message presented to the other ear.

However, when Moray presented the listener’s name to the unattended ear, about a third of the participants detected it.

Question 14

Gray and Wedderburn (1960)

Answer 14

showed that information presented to the unattended ear is processed enough to provide the listener with some awareness of its meaning.

“Dear Aunt Jane” experiment.

dichotic listening experiment

the attended (shadowed) ear received the message “Dear 7 Jane,” and the unattended ear received the message “9 Aunt 6.”

However, rather than reporting the “Dear 7 Jane” message that was presented to the attended ear, participants reported hearing “Dear Aunt Jane.”

Switching to the unattended channel to say “Aunt” means that the participant’s attention had jumped from one ear to the other and then back again.

This switch occurred because participants were taking the meaning of the words into account. (An example of top-down processing!.)

Question 15

Anne Treisman (1964)

Answer 15

proposed a modification of Broadbent’s model.

Treisman proposed that selection occurs in two stages, and she replaced Broadbent’s filter with an attenuator.

The attenuator analyzes the incoming message in terms of

(1)
its physical characteristics—whether it is high-pitched or low-pitched, fast or slow;

(2)
its language—how the message groups into syllables or words; and

(3)
its meaning—how sequences of words create meaningful phrases.

Note that the attenuator represents a process and is not identified with a specific brain structure.

Attended messages pass through the attenuator at full strength, and unattended messages pass through with reduced strength.

Question 16

attenuation model of attention

Answer 16

Anne Treisman’s model of selective attention that proposes that selection occurs in two stages. In the first stage, an attenuator analyzes the incoming message and lets through the attended message—and also the unattended message, but at a lower (attenuated) strength.

Treisman proposed that the analysis of the message proceeds only as far as is necessary to identify the attended message.

Because at least some of the unattended message gets through the attenuator, Treisman’s model has been called a “leaky filter” model.

The final output of the system is determined in the second stage when the message is analyzed by the dictionary unit.

The dictionary unit contains words, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated.

A threshold is the smallest signal strength that can barely be detected. Thus, a word with a low threshold might be detected even when it is presented softly or is obscured by other words.

According to Treisman, words that are common or especially important, such as the listener’s name, have low thresholds, so even a weak signal in the unattended channel can activate that word, and we hear our name from across the room.

Uncommon words or words that are unimportant to the listener have higher thresholds, so it takes the strong signal of the attended message to activate these words.

Treisman’s is called an early selection model because it proposes a filter that operates at an early stage in the flow of information.

Question 17

Donald MacKay (1973)

Answer 17

a participant listened to an ambiguous sentence, such as “They were throwing stones at the bank,” that could be interpreted in more than one way. (In this example, “bank” can refer to a riverbank or a financial institution.)

These ambiguous sentences were presented to the attended ear while biasing words were presented to the other, unattended ear.

For example, as the participant was shadowing “They were throwing stones at the bank,” either the word “river” or the word “money” was presented to the unattended ear.

After hearing several ambiguous sentences, the participants were presented with pairs of sentences, such as “They threw stones toward the side of the river yesterday” and “They threw stones at the savings and loan association yesterday,” and asked to indicate which of these two sentences was closest in meaning to one of the sentences they had heard previously.

MacKay found that the meaning of the biasing word affected the participants’ choice.

For example, if the biasing word was “money,” participants were more likely to pick the second sentence.

This outcome occurred even though participants reported that they were unaware of the biasing words that had been presented to the unattended ear.

Question 18

priming and repetition priming

Answer 18

A change in response to a stimulus caused by the previous presentation of the same or a similar stimulus. See also Repetition priming.

When an initial presentation of a stimulus affects the person’s response to the same stimulus when it is presented later.

Question 19

lexical priming

Answer 19

Priming that involves the meaning of words. For example, rose would prime flower because their meanings are related.

Question 20

late selection models of attention

Answer 20

A model of selective attention that proposes that selection of stimuli for final processing does not occur until after the information in the message has been analyzed for meaning.

Question 21

“early–late” controversy

Answer 21

However, as research in selective attention progressed, researchers realized that there is no one answer to what has been called the “early–late” controversy.

Early selection can be demonstrated under some conditions and later selection under others, depending on the observer’s task and the type of stimuli presented.

Thus, researchers began focusing instead on understanding the many different factors that control attention.

Question 22

processing capacity

Answer 22

The amount of information input that a person can handle. This sets a limit on the person’s ability to process information.

Question 23

perceptual load

Answer 23

Related to the difficulty of a task.

Low-load tasks use only a small amount of a person’s processing capacity. (A task that uses few resources, leaving some capacity to handle other tasks.)

High-load tasks use more of the processing capacity. (A task that uses most or all of a person’s resources and so leaves little capacity to handle other tasks.)

Question 24

Sophie Forster and Lavie (2008)

Answer 24

studied the role of processing capacity and perceptual load in determining distraction.

The participants’ task was to respond as quickly as possible when they identified a target, either X or N.

Participants pressed one key if they saw the X and another key if they saw the N.

target is surrounded by just one type of letter, like the small o’s.

However, the task becomes harder when the target is surrounded by different letters.

This difference is reflected in the reaction times, with the hard task resulting in longer reaction times than the easy task.

However, when a task-irrelevant stimulus—like the unrelated cartoon character is flashed below the display, responding slows for the easy task more than for the hard task.

Question 25

load theory of attention

Answer 25

Proposal that the ability to ignore task-irrelevant stimuli depends on the load of the task the person is carrying out. High-load tasks result in less distraction. (do not leave any resources to process unattended task-irrelevant stimuli. have little effect on the performance of the task). low-load task, processing capacity still remains. This capacity means that resources are available to process the task-irrelevant stimulus (like the cartoon character), and even though the person was told not to pay attention to the task-irrelevant stimulus, it gets processed and slows down the response. The ability to ignore task-irrelevant stimuli is a function of both the load of the task you are trying to do and how powerful the task-irrelevant stimulus is.

Question 26

Endogenous attention

Answer 26

Attention that is focused voluntarily on a stimulus in a sustained, goal-driven manner.

Question 27

Exogenous attention

Answer 27

Attention that is involuntarily directed toward a stimulus in a transient, fleeting manner.

Question 28

Stroop effect

Answer 28

An effect originally studied by J. R. Stroop, using a task in which a person is instructed to respond to one aspect of a stimulus, such as the color of ink that a word is printed in, and ignore another aspect, such as the color that the word names. The Stroop effect refers to the fact that people find this task difficult when, for example, the word RED is printed in blue ink. An example of a situation in which task-irrelevant stimuli are difficult to ignore is provided by the Stroop effect. In the Stroop effect, the task-irrelevant stimuli are extremely powerful, because reading words is highly practiced and has become so automatic that it is difficult not to read them.

Question 29

Central vision and Peripheral vision

Answer 29

Central vision describes the center-most region of our visual field, and this area is usually where we focus our attention. Peripheral vision is everything that surrounds the center of our visual field; it is in the periphery. Because of the way the retina is constructed, objects in central vision fall on a small area called the fovea, which has much better detail vision than the peripheral retina, on which the rest of the scene falls. For this reason, central vision is sometimes called foveal vision.

Question 30

Scanning a Scene with Eye Movements

Answer 30

Scanning is necessary because good vision for detail occurs only when you are looking at something directly.

Question 31

fixation

Answer 31

In perception and attention, a pausing of the eyes on places of interest while observing a scene.

Question 32

saccadic eye movement

Answer 32

Eye movements from one fixation point to another.

Question 33

overt attention

Answer 33

Shifting of attention by moving the eyes. because we can notice attentional shifts by observing where the eyes are looking. Contrasts with Covert attention.

Question 34

two factors that determine how people shift their attention by moving their eyes

Answer 34

bottom-up, based primarily on physical characteristics of the stimulus; and top-down, based on cognitive factors such as the observer’s knowledge about scenes and past experiences with specific stimuli.

Question 35

stimulus salience

Answer 35

Bottom-up factors that determine attention to elements of a scene. Examples are color, contrast, and orientation. The meaningfulness of the images, which is a top-down factor, does not contribute to stimulus salience

Question 36

saliency map

Answer 36

Map of a scene that indicates the stimulus salience of areas and objects in the scene. Experiments in which people’s eyes were tracked as they observed pictures have found the first few fixations are likely to land on high-salience areas. However, after the first few fixations, scanning begins to be influenced by top-down, or cognitive, processes that depend on things such as the observers’ goals and expectations determined by their past experiences in observing the environment.

Question 37

scene schemas

Answer 37

A person’s knowledge about what is likely to be contained in a particular scene. This knowledge can help guide attention to different areas of the scene. For example, knowledge of what is usually in an office may cause a person to look toward the desk to see the computer. Melissa Võ and John Henderson (2009) showed pictures that contained scene-typical and scene-atypical items. —People look longer at things that seem out of place in a scene because their attention is affected by their knowledge of what is usually found in the given environment. Hiroyuki Shinoda and colleagues (2001) measured observers’ fixations and tested their ability to detect traffic signs as they drove through a computer-generated environment in a driving simulator. They found that the observers were more likely to detect stop signs positioned at intersections than those positioned in the middle of a block and that 45 percent of the observers’ fixations occurred close to intersections. In this example, the observers are using knowledge about regularities in the environment (stop signs are usually at corners) to determine when and where to look for stop signs.

Question 38

Scanning Based on Task Demands

Answer 38

The key finding of studies such as this one is that the person’s eye movements were determined primarily by the task. The person fixated on a few objects or areas that were irrelevant to the task, and eye movements and fixations were closely linked to the action the person was about to take. Furthermore, the eye movement usually preceded a motor action by a fraction of a second, as when the person first fixated on the peanut butter jar and then reached over to pick it up. This situation is an example of the “just in time” strategy—eye movements occur just before we need the information they will provide. The examples we have described in connection with scanning based on cognitive factors and task demands have something in common: They all provide evidence that scanning is influenced by people’s predictions.

Question 39

covert attention

Answer 39

Occurs when attention is shifted without moving the eyes, commonly referred to as seeing something “out of the corner of one’s eye.” Contrasts with Overt attention. This type of attending involves shifting attention “with the mind” One reason some researchers have studied covert attention is that it is a way of studying what is happening in the mind without the interference of eye movements.

Question 40

pre-cueing

Answer 40

A technique used in cognitive psychology where a cue directs attention to a specific location in the visual field before a target appears. Imagine you were focusing your attention on a drop of water on the side of a glass. You are more likely to see a fly that lands on the same glass because your attention is already focused on this object. Now imagine your attention was focused on your fork instead of the drop of water on the glass. (Note: the drop of water and the fork are equally far away from the fly.) Because your fork is not the same object as your glass, you are less likely to notice the fly when focusing on the fork than when focusing on the drop of water on the glass.

Question 41

Michael Posner and colleagues (1978)

Answer 41

set out to determine whether the attention we dedicate to certain objects or locations improves our ability to more quickly attend to nearby or related locations. To answer this question, Posner used a procedure called pre-cueing . Posner’s findings and others like it gave rise to the idea that attention is like a spotlight or zoom lens that improves processing when directed toward a particular location and suppresses nonrelevant information to overcome limitations to attention capacity.

Question 42

same-object advantage

Answer 42

Occurs when the enhancing effect of attention spreads throughout an object, so that attention to one place on an object results in a facilitation of processing at other places on the object.

Question 43

Attention Affects Perception

Answer 43

many experiments have shown that attended objects are perceived to be bigger, faster, and more richly colored, and to have better contrast than non-attended objects. Attention therefore not only causes us to respond faster to locations and objects but actually affects how we perceive the object

Question 44

Ritobrato Datta and Edgar DeYoe (2009)

Answer 44

What happens in the brain when people shift their attention to different locations while keeping their eyes stationary? In terms of physiology. Answered this question by measuring brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as participants kept their eyes fixed on the center of the display and shifted their attention to different locations in the display. Notice the activation hot spot moves further away from the center dot as attention also shifts further away from the center dot, indicating these changes in activation were due to the shifting of attention and not where the eyes were fixed. Datta and DeYoe created “attention maps” that show how directing attention to a specific area of space activates a specific region of the brain. What makes this experiment even more interesting is that after attention maps were determined for a particular participant, that participant was told to direct their attention to a “secret” place, unknown to the experimenters. Based on the location of the resulting yellow “hot spot” in the brain, the experimenters were able to predict, with 100 percent accuracy, the “secret” place where the participant was attending! Datta and DeYoe’s “hot spot” experiment is an elegant demonstration of how attention directed to a specific location results in enhanced activity at one place in the cortex.

Question 45

Tolga Cukur and colleagues (2013)

Answer 45

What about a situation in which people might be directing their attention to numerous different locations as they search for something in a “real-world” environment? considered this question by determining how attention affects the way different types of objects are represented across the brain as a whole. Starting point for Cukur’s experiment was Alex Huth’s (2012) brain map. Huth’s map illustrates how different categories of objects and actions are represented by activity that is distributed across a large area of the brain. _{Huth determined this map by having participants view movies in a scanner, and using fMRI to determine brain activity when different things were happening on the screen.} Cukur did the same thing as Huth with one important change. had three groups of participants: one that passively viewed the films, a second group that searched for humans, and a third group that searched for vehicles. plotting how a single voxel in the brain responded to different types of stimuli under two different search conditions. Notice in (a) that when the observer is searching for “humans” in the movie, the voxel responds well to “person,” slightly to “animal,” and hardly at all to “building” and “vehicle.” However, in (b), when the observer is searching for “vehicle,” the voxel’s tuning shifts so it now responds well to “vehicle,” slightly to “building,” but not to “person” or “animal.” The most obvious difference between the search-for-people brain and the search-for-vehicles brain occurs at the top of the brain in this view. Notice that in the person condition there are more yellows and greens, which represent people-related categories such as body parts, animals, groups, and talking. However, in the vehicles condition colors shift to reds, which represent vehicle-related categories such as movement, road, and devices. In these brain maps, looking for a particular category can increase corresponding responses in the brain while also increasing responses to things related to that category.

Question 46

attentional warping

Answer 46

Occurs when the map of categories on the brain changes to make more space for categories that are being searched for as a person attends to a scene. For example, looking for people also impacts responses related to groups and clothing. This effect occurs even when the attended category is not present in the movie. For example, when a person is on the lookout for vehicles prior to viewing the movie, the brain becomes “warped” or “tuned” so that large areas respond best to vehicles and things related to vehicles. Then, when a vehicle, a road, or movement appears in a scene, a large response occurs. Other things, which the person is not looking for at the moment, would cause smaller responses.

Question 47

Task switching

Answer 47

A shifting of attention and cognitive resources from one task to another. sometimes called concept switching. Rather than sharing these cognitive resources, they are quickly shifted from task to task. No matter whether it happens rapidly or more slowly, task switching requires disengagement from one task to accomplish the other.

Question 48

Multitasking

Answer 48

A phenomenon in which a person attempts to consciously divide attention between multiple tasks while also attempting to switch between those tasks. Due to the complexity of multitasking, unsurprisingly, most people are not good multitaskers.

Question 49

Walter Schneider and Richard Shiffrin (1977)

Answer 49

Experiments by Walter Schneider and Richard Shiffrin (1977) involved divided attention because they required the participant to carry out two tasks simultaneously: (1) holding information about target stimuli in memory and (2) paying attention to a series of “distractor” stimuli to determine whether one of the target stimuli is present among these distractor stimuli. The participant was shown a memory set consisting of one to four characters called target stimuli. The memory set was followed by the rapid presentation of 20 “test frames,” each of which contained distractors. In half of the trials, one of the frames contained a target stimulus from the memory set. A new memory set was presented on each trial, so the targets changed from trial to trial, followed by new test frames. The goal of this experiment was to determine how long it would take for participants to be able to accomplish this divided attention task with some level of proficiency. At the beginning the participants’ performance was only 55 percent correct; it took 900 trials for performance to reach 90 percent. Participants reported that for the first 600 trials, they had to keep rehearsing the target items in each memory set to remember them. However, after about 600 trials, participants reported the task had become automatic: The frames appeared, and participants responded without consciously thinking about it. What this result means, according to Schneider and Shiffrin, is that practice made it possible for participants to divide their attention to deal with all the target and test items simultaneously. Furthermore, the many trials of practice resulted in automatic processing.

Question 50

automatic processing

Answer 50

Processing that occurs automatically, without the person’s intending to do it, and that also uses few cognitive resources. Automatic processing is associated with easy or well-practiced tasks. Real-life experiences are filled with examples of automatic processing because we have been practicing many things for years. For example, have you ever wondered, after leaving home, whether you had locked the door and then returned to find that you had? Locking the door has, for many people, become such an automatic response that they do it without paying attention. Concert pianists have reported that if they start paying attention to their fingers while they are playing, their performance falls apart. In fact, cognitive psychologists have a name for this: choking.

Question 51

Choking

Answer 51

A decline in performance following increased conscious awareness or intended control of a task, also called cognitive choking. Choking is more common when people are under pressure or stress, which is likely why they are trying to intentionally control the task in the first place.

Question 52

productivity illusion

Answer 52

The false belief that multitasking makes a person more productive, while actual productivity tends to be slower and lower quality.

Question 53

Distractions by the Internet

Answer 53

Tindall and Bohlander (2012) found that 92 percent of college students have texted, browsed the web, sent pictures, or accessed social media during class time. By studying college students’ phone bills, Judith Gold and colleagues (2015) determined that they send an average of 58 text messages a day. Rosen and colleagues (2013) showed that during a 15-minute study session, students averaged less than 6 minutes on-task before interrupting studying to stretch, watch TV, access websites, or use technology such as texting or social media. Zoom fatigue” is a new term that describes an attentional cost due to the constant use of virtual meeting technologies. Multitasking has been shown to impair learning, in particular when the learning comes from instructional videos (Mercimek et al., 2019). The rate of multitasking during use of these virtual environments has increased, leading to poorer general productivity and learning.

Question 54

mind wandering

Answer 54

Thoughts that come from within a person, often unintentionally. In early research this was called daydreaming. One of the properties of mind wandering is that it is extremely prevalent. Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert (2010) used the experience sampling technique to contact people at random intervals during the day and ask them, “What are you doing right now?” Mind wandering occurred 47 percent of the time and occurred when people were involved in a wide range of activities. Mind wandering has been shown to be distracting enough to disrupt an ongoing task. The phenomenon, called mindless reading or zoned-out reading, is one example of how mind wandering decreases performance. - An example of disruption by mind wandering is what happens while reading, when you suddenly realize that you have no idea what you have just read because you were thinking about something else. Another property of mind wandering is that it is usually associated with activity in the default mode network (DMN). the DMN becomes activated when a person is not involved in a task.

Question 55

inattentional blindness

Answer 55

A phenomenon in which people are unaware of clearly visible stimuli if they are not directing their attention to them. illustrates how we can miss things even if they are clearly visible. it is possible to be very attentive and still miss things.

Question 56

Cartwright-Finch and Nilli Lavie (2007)

Answer 56

had participants view the cross stimulus. The cross was presented for five trials, and the observer’s task was to indicate which arm of the briefly flashed cross was longer, the horizontal or the vertical. This task is difficult because the arms were just slightly different in length, the cross was flashed rapidly, and the arm that was longer changed from trial to trial. On the sixth trial, a small outline of a square was added to the display. Immediately after the sixth trial, participants were asked whether they noticed if anything had appeared on the screen that they had not seen before. Out of 20 participants, only two reported that they had seen the square. In other words, most of the participants were “blind” to the small square, even though it was located right next to the cross. This demonstration of inattentional blindness used a rapidly flashed geometric test stimulus.

Question 57

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (1999)

Answer 57

showed that attention can affect perception within a dynamic scene by having observers view a short film that showed two “teams” of three players each. One team, dressed in white, was passing a basketball around, and the other was “guarding” that team by following them around and putting their arms up as in a basketball game. Observers were told to count the number of passes, a task that focused their attention on the team wearing white. After about 45 seconds, one of two events occurred: Either a woman carrying an umbrella or a person in a gorilla suit walked through the “game,” an event that took 5 seconds. After watching the video, observers were asked whether they saw anything unusual happen or whether they saw anything other than the six players. Nearly half of the observers—46 percent—failed to report that they saw the woman or the gorilla. This experiment demonstrates that when observers are attending to one sequence of events, they can fail to notice another event, even when it is right in front of them.

Question 58

visual search

Answer 58

Occurs when a person is looking for one stimulus or object among a number of other stimuli or objects.

Question 59

inattentional deafness

Answer 59

Occurs when inattention causes a person to miss an auditory stimulus. For example, experiments have shown that it is more difficult to detect a tone when engaged in a difficult visual search task.

Question 60

Dana Raveh and Nilli Lavie (2015)

Answer 60

had participants carry out a visual search task, where visual search involves scanning a scene to find a specific object. They presented either an easy visual search task, or a difficult task. Participants were also asked to indicate whether they heard a tone that was presented during the visual display on about a fifth of the trials. The results indicate that it was more difficult to detect the tone when engaged in the difficult visual search task. This situation, in which focusing on a difficult visual task results in impaired hearing, is an example of inattentional deafness. This result is significant both because it shows that inattentional effects can occur across vision and hearing, and also because it shows how Lavie’s load theory of attention can be applied to explaining the effects of inattention. showed that being involved in a high-load task increases the chances of missing other stimuli.

Question 61

change detection

Answer 61

Detecting differences between pictures or displays that are presented one after another. demonstrated how limitations of attention can affect perception.

Question 62

change blindness

Answer 62

Difficulty in detecting changes in similar, but slightly different, scenes that are presented one after another. The changes are often easy to see once attention is directed to them but are usually undetected in the absence of appropriate attention. The frequency with which change blindness occurs can be startling. _{For example, in one study (Grimes, 1996), 100 percent of observers failed to detect a one-fourth increase in the size of a building, 92 percent failed to detect a one-third reduction in a flock of birds, 58 percent failed to detect a change in a model’s swimsuit from bright pink to bright green, 50 percent failed to notice that two cowboys had exchanged their heads, and 25 percent failed to notice a 180-degree rotation of Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyland!} Change blindness occurs regularly in popular films

Question 63

continuity errors

Answer 63

In film, changes that occur from one scene to another that do not match, such as when a character reaches for a croissant in one shot, which turns into a pancake in the next shot.

Question 64

What About Everyday Experience?

Answer 64

role has implications for perception in our everyday experience because a large number of stimuli are present in the environment, and we can pay attention to only a small fraction of these stimuli at any moment. This idea means that we are constantly missing things in the environment. it has been argued that the tendency of our perceptual systems to focus on only a small portion of the environment is one of their most adaptive features because by focusing on what is important, our perceptual systems make optimal use of our limited processing resources. Also, while we are focusing on what is important at the moment, our perceptual systems are simultaneously monitoring a warning system that responds to motion or intense stimuli, which causes us to rapidly shift our attention to things that might signal danger. Once our attention has shifted, we can then evaluate what is happening at our new center of attention and decide whether we need to take action. Importantly, we do not need to be consciously aware of all the details of what is happening around us. What this all means is that our perceptual systems are generally well adapted to take in the information we need to survive, even though we can only take in a small proportion of the information out there. But as adaptive as perceptual systems might be, our modern world often puts us in situations that we are not designed to deal with and may push these systems past their capabilities.

Question 65

binding

Answer 65

Process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create perception of a coherent object. This function of attention is to help create binding.

Question 66

binding problem

Answer 66

The problem of explaining how an object’s individual features become bound together. addressed by Anne Treisman’s (1986, 1988, 1999) feature integration theory.

Question 67

feature integration theory (FIT)

Answer 67

An approach to object perception, developed by Anne Treisman, that proposes a sequence of stages in which features are first analyzed and then combined to result in perception of an object. The first step in object processing is the pre-attentive stage. In the next stage of processing, called the focused attention stage. In this two-stage process, you can think of visual features as components of a “visual alphabet.” At the very beginning of the process, information about each of these components exists independently of one another, just as the letter tiles in a game of Scrabble exist as individual units when the tiles are scattered at the beginning of the game. However, just as the individual Scrabble tiles are combined to form words, the individual features combine to form perceptions of whole objects. The idea that an object is automatically broken into features may seem counterintuitive because we always see whole objects, not objects that have been divided into individual features. The reason we are not aware of this process of feature analysis is that it occurs early in the perceptual process, before we have become conscious of the object.

Question 68

pre-attentive stage

Answer 68

The first stage of Treisman’s feature integration theory, in which an object is analyzed into its features. occurs before we focus attention on an object. Because attention is not involved, researchers argue that this stage is automatic, unconscious, and effortless. In this stage, the features of objects are analyzed independently in separate regions of the brain and are not yet associated with a specific object.

Question 69

focused attention stage

Answer 69

The second stage of Treisman’s feature integration theory. According to the theory, attention causes the combination of features into perception of an object.

Question 70

illusory conjunctions

Answer 70

A situation, demonstrated in experiments by Anne Treisman, in which features from different objects are inappropriately combined. Illusory conjunctions can occur even if the stimuli differ greatly in shape and size. likely to happen (and perhaps quite often do) in our everyday experiences. Research into eyewitness testimony. occur because in the pre-attentive stage, each feature exists independently of the others. That is, features such as “redness,” “curvature,” or “tilted line” are, at this early stage of processing, not associated with a specific object. They are, in Treisman’s (1986) words, “free floating,” and can therefore be incorrectly combined if there is more than one object, especially in laboratory situations when briefly flashed stimuli are followed by a masking field.

Question 71

Balint’s syndrome

Answer 71

A condition caused by brain damage in which a person has difficulty focusing attention on individual objects. parietal lobe damage According to feature integration theory, a lack of focused attention would make it difficult for R.M. to combine features correctly, and this outcome is exactly what happened.

Question 72

conjunction search

Answer 72

Searching among distractors for a target that involves two or more features, such as “horizontal” and “green.” Visual Search Another approach to studying the role of attention in binding. Conjunction searches are useful for studying binding because finding the target in a conjunction search involves scanning a display in order to focus attention at a specific location.

Question 73

ventral attention network

Answer 73

A network that controls attention based on stimulus salience.

Question 74

dorsal attention network

Answer 74

A network that controls attention based on top-down processing.

Question 75

effective connectivity

Answer 75

How easily activity can travel along a particular pathway between two structures.

Question 76

synchronization

Answer 76

Occurs when neural responses become synchronized in time, so positive and negative responses occur at the same time and with similar amplitudes. It has been proposed that synchronization is a mechanism responsible for enhanced effective connectivity and enhanced communication between two areas that accompany shifts of attention.

Question 77

executive attention network

Answer 77

A proposed neural network responsible for executive functions. Executive functions: A number of processes that involve controlling attention and dealing with conflicting responses.

Question 78

cognitive control, inhibitory control and willpower

Answer 78

A mechanism involved in dealing with conflicting stimuli. Related to executive function, inhibitory control, and willpower. A mechanism involved in dealing with conflicting stimuli. Related to executive function, cognitive control and willpower. A mechanism involved in dealing with conflicting stimuli. Related to executive function, inhibitory control, and cognitive control.