Lecture 4 - Selective Attention

Question 1

What did Cherry (1953) do

Answer 1

Cherry (1953)

• Dichotic listening
• ‘Shadow’ the message to one ear and
  ignore message to other ear

Question 2

What did Cherry (1953) find

Answer 2

• After shadowing, pps were asked about semantic content of ‘unattended’ message
• Didn’t notice if language changed from English to German
  -or if speech was reversed
• Gender of speaker and if the message contained speech or nonspeech sounds was remembered

Question 3

What are the conclusions of Cherry (1953)

Answer 3

• People process ‘unattended’ information ONLY to level of physical features
• No semantic information is available from ‘unattended’ message

Question 4

What is the early selection model

Answer 4

Broadbent (1958)

• Filtering occurs at early stage of analysis (before meaning)
• Brain filters out any message without appropriate ‘physical’ characteristics

Arrows represent information passing through different stages

Early Selection Model

Question 5

What did Moray (1959) find in his version of a dichotic listening task

Answer 5

Used 2 alternative forced choice procedure (2AFC)

• Even a word repeated 35 times in unattended ear wasn’t recognised
• BUT if that word was pp’s own name, they did report hearing it (only for 33% of pps)

2AFC means that instead of asking an open ended q 2 options are presented and pps are asked to pick which is right

Question 6

What did Gray & Wedderburn (1960) find in their version of a dichotic listening task

Answer 6

Split-span experiment

• 40% reported by ear
• 60% reported by meaning

Conlusion is the ‘unattended’ message was processed for content after all (by at least 60% of pps)

Messages alternate by ear "Dear Aunt Jane" and "3 4 5"

Question 7

What is the late selection model

Answer 7

Deutsch and Deutsch (1963)

• All inputs encoded & analysed in
  parallel to semantic level
• Selective filtering only occurs at conscious awareness

Arrows represent information passing through different stages

Filtering happens later rather than earlier

Question 8

What is evidence in support of the late selection model

Deutsch and Deutsch (1963)

Answer 8

Corteen & Dunn (1974)

Training: City names paired w/ electric shock
-Subjects sweat when they hear any
city name

Question 9

What was the procedure of Corteen & Dunn (1974)

Answer 9

• Training: City names paired w/ electric shock
  -Subjects sweat when they hear any city name
• Test: Shadow one ear and ignore other
  -Press a button if you hear a city name in either ear

Question 10

What is the measures of Corteen & Dunn (1974)

Answer 10

• Test: Shadow one ear and ignore other
  -Press a button if you hear a city name in either ear
• Measures: galvanic skin responses (GSRs) & button presses to city names.

Question 11

What is a galvanic skin response (GSR)

Answer 11

Measures the skin’s electrical changes

irt sweat gland activity in fingers & palms

Question 12

What did Corteen & Dunn (1974) find

Answer 12

• 42% of city names in ‘unattended’ ear elicit a GSR (30% for non shock associated city names)
• On only 2% of these trials did the pp make a button press response
• Different measures of awareness of ‘unattended’ stimuli give different results

Question 13

What is the attenuator model

Answer 13

Treisman (1964)

• Unattended information is ‘attenuated’
  -not filtered out completely
• All inputs are analysed for meaning
  -but some signals are now weaker than others

Question 14

What is the dictionary analysis filter in the attenuator model

Treisman (1964)

Answer 14

• The dictionary analysis units act as the final filter
• Different words have different trigger thresholds (e.g. your name has a low threshold)

words are attenuated based on significance
-words with little significance have high thresholds and get stopped by this filter
vice versa

Question 15

What are the advantages of the attenuator model

Treisman (1964)

Answer 15

• Allows for nuance
• Builds upon the foundation of previous models
• Aims to explain why some words pass through & others don’t
  -which other models fail to explain
• Thresholds of certain words can change over time as well
  -taking into account the “dear aunt jane” / “1 2 3” example, the context of the prior words lowers the threshold for the following ones, which explains why those words are more easily detected

Question 16

What did Neisser & Becklen (1975) find

Answer 16

• Superimposed 2 videos onto each other
• PPs monitored one video for targets left pps unaware of events in the unmonitored video
• People shocked to hear this when told about facts they missed in the unattended vid

Question 17

What did Simons & Chabris (1999) find

Answer 17

Gorilla basketball video

• Around 50% of ppl fail to notice the gorilla when attending white T-shirt team
• More likely to notice if carrying out an ‘easy’ task than if carrying out a ‘hard’ task
• More likely to notice gorilla if attending black T-shirt team

Question 18

What did Dalton & Fraenkel (2012) find

Answer 18

70% of ppl fail to notice the auditory gorilla man “I’m a gorilla” repeated for 19s when attending to the women’s conversation

• 90% notice him when attending to the men’s conversation
• All pps (but 1) notice him in the full attention control

Question 19

What is a weakness of the above visual studies which otherwise seem to support the early selection model

Answer 19

May be dependent on eye movement. Rather than attention

Eye movements related to attended events might reduce acuity for unattended events

Question 20

What did Rock & Gutman (1981) find

Answer 20

• 2 shapes superimposed on each other, yellow & pink
• Pps asked to attend to shapes in one colour and rate their pleasant/unpleasantness
• Afterwards pps unable to recognise shapes in ‘unattended’ colour (even if shapes are familiar, and asked only 1 second after shown)

Question 21

What evidence is there that visual tasks DON’T follow the early selection model

Answer 21

• Negative priming (Tipper, 1985)
• 5 primes in order of increasing reaction time to probe (dog)
• Attended repetition
• Attended semantic
• Neutral
• Ignored semantic
• Ignored repetition

Question 22

What is another piece of evidence in support of Broadbent’s early selection model

Answer 22

Lachter, Forster & Ruthruff (2004)

• Attention possible allocated to the supposedly unattended stream at times
• They term this process ‘slippage’

mainly counterpoint for auditory tasks

Question 23

What can explain the mixed findings regarding selection models

Answer 23

Shulman (1990) highlights:

• Over-extrapolation of findings, auditory dichotomy listening might not be adequate to form a whole theory on human attention around it
• Problems with direct report, sometimes pps register things unconsciously but can’t articulate it, GSR, -ve priming

Question 24

What is perceptual load theory procedure Lavie (1995)

Answer 24

Ask pps to find ‘N’ or ‘X’ amongst letters + w/ a distractor present

Found RT ^ w/ incongruent distractor in low load, this supports late selection model, since diff between both distractor variations

both RT lower than high load condition

same RT in high load

this supports early selection model, since no diff between incongruent + congruent in high load

Question 25

What is the conclusions of perceptual load theory

Answer 25

* Perceptual system has a limited capacity * All stimuli are processed automatically until capacity is reached ends the early + late selection model debate

Question 26

High perceptual load theory vs low perceptual load theory according to Lavie (1995)

Answer 26

This is what Selective attention depends on! * High perceptual load in relevant task leaves no spare capacity for processing task-irrelevant stimuli * Low perceptual load leaves spare capacity which “spills over” involuntarily to the processing of task-irrelevant stimuli

Question 27

What is perceptual load defined by | Rees et al. (1997)

Answer 27

more perceptual load is "increasing the number of items in a display or increasing the processing requirement for the same number of items"