L4 Attention

• Dichotic listening task


  • Two different messages are transmitted to the two ears
  • Participant is asked to shadow one of the messages while ignoring the other
  • After a trail they are asked questions about the unattended information
  • Ptps knew whether or not a voice was presented, could report physical attributes of the voice e.g. gender, knew little about the content and were unable to report the language.
  • Therefore - information is processed only to a very shallow degree
• What is Broadbent’s filter model?


  • Chunks of sensorial information are represented as balls.
  • Attentional selection is symbolised as a Y shaped tube through which information must pass.
  • Information enters through sensory channels and is filtered as it proceeds.
  • The tube only accepts one ball at a time, with the hinged flap as a filter

  
• What is the cocktail party phenomenon?

  Highly pertinent stimuli can suddenly capture one’s attention in a noisy environment e.g. name/ swear words.
• Treisman study


  • participant is asked to report information presented to one ear.
  • Fragments from the unattended channel are occasionally reported if they are congruent with the content of the attended message - see diagram
  • This implies that unattended information must have been processed to a certain extent.

  
• Treisman’s attentuation model

  1. Unattended information is not entirely blocked.
  2. Attention acts as a selective filter.
  3. First, physical properties of sensory information are analysed.
  4. Next, knowledge about words is accessed - mental lexicon. Entries in the mental lexicon are stored in terms of frequency of occurence, relevance etc, and have varying recognition thresholds.
  5. Thresholds can also be temporarily lowered by expectations.
  6. If the signal passes both filters, meaning is analysed.
• Late selection theories

  • Selection of information regarding conscious awareness occurs only after analysis of meaning
  • All sensorial information is always processed nonselectively and up to the level of meaning.
  • output of sensorial processing is placed in STM
  • Information in STM is quickly lost, and this acts as ‘attentional bottleneck‘
• Evidence for late selection - subliminal perception


  Participants are very briefly presented with words that may prime the next word, but it is so quick they would not register this. If they are presented with a related word this will increase the speed of performance when asked about the words compared to being primed with an unrelated word.

  
• Evidence for late selection - negative priming

  • A display with two dimensions is presented.
  • Ptps are asked to attend to one dimension and ignore the other
  • Trial one - ptps have to ignore the apple, then in trial two they have to recognise it.
  • Average naming times to the target object are slower if ignored on the previous trial.
  • This suggests ignored information is actively suppressed.

  
• Kahneman - Capacity theory


  • Inability to perform two tasks at once is not the result of built-in attentional bottleneck
  • Instead, people have a limited-capacity pool of attention to carry out mental activities
  • How much capacity is available depends on task demands, arousal e.g. alertness, individual differences, and momentary intentions (how important it is to you)
• Allocation policy

  Individuals have substantial control over how they allocate their attention but performance will decline if attentional demand exceeds supply.
• Dual task experiments to test capacity theory - Johnston & Heinz


  1. Primary task - ptps press a button when they see a light flash
  2. secondary task - ptps shadow words either by simple repetition, according to a physical category e.g. gender, or according to a semantic category e.g. shadow the word that is a city.
  3. The speed of pressing the button is affected by the difficult of shadowing, it is slowest with the hardest task.
• Automaticity

  Complex activities shift from attention demanding to automatic mode through practice.
• Automatic processing characteristics

  • Occurs without intention
  • Not open to conscious awareness or introspection
  • Consumes few conscious resources
  • Operates very rapidly, usually in 1 sec
• Conscious processing characteristics

  • Only occurs with intention
  • Open to awareness and introspection
  • Uses conscious resources, drains the pool of conscious attentional capacity
  • Takes more than a second or two for completion, slow
• Stroop conflict

  A situation in which individuals find it difficult to ignore one dimension when responding to the other.

  The ignored dimension, reading the word, is highly practiced and overlearned. It is unintentionally and automatically processed to a high level without demanding mental capacities.

  The target dimension, naming the colours, is less automatic and requires more effort.

  Incompatible information between dimensions creates conflict, and resolution requires effort and takes time.