Attention
Ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in our environment; 5 main types
Selective Attention
Attending to one thing while ignoring others, such as doing math homework while people talk nearby
Divided Attention
Paying attention to more than one thing at a time, such as listening to a conversation while playing a game
Distraction
When one stimulus interferes with the processing of another stimulus, like a cell phone game being interrupted by a conversation
Attentional Capture
A rapid shifting of attention caused by a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement
Visual Scanning
Moving the eyes from one location or object to another
Broadbent’s Filter Model of Attention
Early selection model, filters out information at the very beginning of processing
SENSORY MEMORY - holds all incoming information for a fraction of a second
FILTER - identifies the unattended message based on physical characteristics (eg voice pitch) and lets only that message through
DETECTOR - processes the attended message to determine its meaning
Dichotic Listening
In “shadowing” experiments, a person hears different messages in each ear; they can focus on the attended ear, but they usually remain unaware of the content in the unattended ear (cocktail party effect)
Moray’s Name Experiment
Participants recognized their own names even in the unattended ear, suggesting the filter isn’t absolute and some meaning gets through
Treisman’s Attenuation Model
Replaced the filter with an attenuator; this “leaky filter” lets both messages through, but the attended one is at full strength, while the unattended one is weakened (attenuated)
Dictionary Unit
Words have different thresholds fro activation; important words like your name have a low threshold and are easily detected even if they are week
Late Selection Model
Proposed by MacKay; suggests that most incoming information is processed to the level of meaning before the message to be further processed is selected (ex, hearing bank and waiting to find out if it is river or money)
Processing Capacity
Amount of information a person can handle; sets a limit on their ability to process incoming information
Perceptual load
The difficulty of a given task
Low - load: use only a small amount of capacity, leaving resources available for distracting stimuli
High - load: use almost all capacity, making you less likely to be distracted because no resources remain to process other stimuli
The Stroop Effect
Harder to name the ink colour of a word if the word itself is the name of a different colour because reading is highly automatic and creates a powerful task - irrelevant stimulus that competes with your ability to name the colour
Overt Attention
Shifting attention by moving the eyes
Fixation: a brief pause on a specific object
Saccadic eye movement: a rapid, jerky movement between fixations
Scanning Based on Stimulus Salience
Bottom - up processing based on physical properties like colour or contrast; a saliency map determines which areas of a scene stand out
Scanning Based on Cognitive Factors
Top - down processing based on goals and expectations; people use scene schemas and look longer at objects that seem out of place, like a printer in a kitchen
Scanning Based on Task Demans
The “just in time” strategy posits that eye movements occur just before we need the information they provide for an action, such as looking at a peanut butter jar before reaching for it
Covert Attention
Shifting attention without moving the eyes
Attention to Location
Precueing experiments (Posner) showed that participants react faster to a target when their attention is already focused on that location, acting like a spotlight that improves processing
Attention to Objects
The same - object advantage occurs when attention directed to one part of an object causes the enhancing effect to spread throughout the entire object
Physiological Responding
Attention to specific locations creates “attention maps” in the brain; additionally, attentional warping occurs when searching for a category (like “humans”) , causing the brain to allot more space on its category map to that category
Automatic Processing
A type of processing that occurs without intention and uses only some cognitive resources; it can be achieved with extensive practice (ex., after 600 trials in search tasks)
