Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience
Cognitive Processes; Attention & Language Summary Notes + Experiment from Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience ISBN-10: 9
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Chap 4:
Latency- Is like response time but opposite. slower latency- higher response time- less selective
attention. (took them longer). Faster Latency- lower response time.
Overt Attention- shifting attention from one place to another by the movement of eyes. (move
over)
Covert Attention- When attention is shifted without moving eyes. (seeing something out of corner
of eye). (undercover)
Divided attention can be overt, covert or combined. (paying attention to something you are looking
at (overt) while at the same time paying attention to something off to the side (covert)
would also be divided attention.
Early Selection Model (Broadbent):
1. Sensory memory holds all of the incoming information for a fraction of a second
and then transfers all of it to the next stage.
2. Filter identifies the attended message based on its physical characteristics—
things like the speaker’s tone of voice, pitch, speed of talking, and accent—and lets
only this message pass through to the detector in the next stage.
3. The detector processes information to determine higher-level characteristics of the
message, such as its meaning. (because only important info can go through filter)
4. Short-term memory receives the output of the detector. Short-term memory holds
information for 10–15 seconds and also transfers information into long-term memory,
which can hold information indefinitely.
This model has been called a bottleneck model because the filter only lets certain information to
pass onto next stage. Only some info goes through to detector. But Broadbent was not 100%
correct in his theory, a few experiments showed that on dichotic listening tasks people were able to
process information that was not the main focus.
Cocktail Party Effect- When a person is selectively listening to one message among many but
hears his name being called simultaneously which is not being attended to.
Treisman’s attenuation model of selective attention: Selection occurs in two stages:
- Incoming message
1. Attenuator- The attenuator analyzes the incoming message in terms of
2. (1)- its physical characteristics—whether it is high pitched or low-pitched, fast or slow;
3. (2) its language—how the message groups into syllables or words
4. (3) its meaning—how sequences of words create meaningful phrases
2. Dictionary Unit- Containing stored words, 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. (E.g.-
someone’s name)
,Once the attended and unattended messages have been identified, both messages
are let through the attenuator, but the attended message emerges at full strength
and the unattended messages are attenuated—they are still present, but are weaker than
the attended message. (‘’leaky filter’’).
Late selection models of attention:
which proposed that most of the incoming information is processed to the level
of meaning before the message to be processed is selected. ( The dichotic listening task with bank
and money).
Cognitive resources - A person has a certain cognitive capacity, which can be used to carry out
various tasks.
Cognitive load- is the amount of a person’s cognitive
resources needed to carry out a particular cognitive task. (Low cognitive load- easy everyday
tasks, High cognitive load- Difficult not practiced tasks).
Flanker compatibility task- participants are told to carry out a task that
requires them to focus their attention on specific stimuli and to ignore other stimuli.
(a) A task with compatible flankers(like B) results in a fast response to A.
(b) Incompatible flankers (like C) result in the slowest response time to A.
(c) Neutral flankers (like X) result in an intermediate response speed.
Divided Attention:
Paying attention to two things at once (like driving and talking).
Schneider and Shiff rin’s (1977) experiment (participants had to identify targets (numbers) from
frames of distractors). Each round had a different target (number), so participants had to forget the
previous target and memorize a new one each time. After 600 trials the response time became
automatic.
This study showed that practice made it possible for participants to divide their attention and reach
automatic processing.
Schneider and Shiffrin made the task more difficult by changing the way the test and distractor
stimuli were presented.
more difficult than the consistent mapping condition because all the characters are letters and also
because a character that was a distractor on one trial (like the T) can become a target
on another trial, and a character that was a target on one trial (like the P) can become a distractor
on another trial.
Controlled Processing- because the participants had to pay close attention at all times and had
to search for the target among the distractors in a much more focused and
controlled way than in the consistent mapping condition.
To conclude, Divided attention is possible and can become automatic if tasks are easy or well-
practiced. Divided attention becomes difficult and can require controlled processing
when the task is made too hard.
Attention and Visual Perception:
, E.g.- When you focus your attention on
the display, you will probably fail to
notice the reflections on the surface
of the window. Shift your attention to
the reflections, and you become less
aware of the display inside the window.
Daniel Simons and Christopher
Chabris- Gorilla/ Basketball experiment.
- Change Detection- Participants were a picture and following the viewing of this picture were
given another picture and had to detect if they noticed any changes in the second picture
compared to the first.
- Change Blindness- Difficulty in detecting differences in scenes.
- Experiment with the two ladies and the 4 movie scenes. In each scene there was a subtle
difference and even after the researchers told the participants to look for changes in the scenes
the participants still couldn't find them. ATTENTION IS NECESSARY FOR PERCEPTION.
Exogenous Attention- Automatic attraction of attention
by a sudden visual or auditory stimulus.
e.g.- hear a sudden noise in back of you so you turn your
head.
Endogenous Attention- When you consciously decide
to scan the environment.
The link between eye movements, attention, and
perception is illustrated by the following
demonstration. (eye tracker, fixations, Saccadic Eye
Movements- moving of the eye from one fixation to the
next)
Two ways which people view and process:
Bottom-up- based primarily on physical characteristics of the stimulus
Stimulus Salience- Physical properties of a stimulus (color, contrast, movement). Capturing
attention this way is a bottom-up process
Top-down- based on the relation between the observer and the scene.
Scene Schemas—an observer’s knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes. (attention is
being affected by their knowledge of what is usually found in the scene).
Covert Attention: has been studied using a procedure called-
Precueing- in which the participant is presented with a “cue” that indicates where a stimulus is
most likely to appear. Precuing has been used to study location-based attention—how attention is
directed to a specific location or place
Object-based attention—attention that is directed to a specific object.
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