attention

• Selective attention


  Paying attention involves selecting relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information
• Broadbent's Filter Theory


  • Early Selection model: Attentional selection operates before observer knows what the information is
  • Selection occurs before meaning is processed from the item
• Dichotic listening task


  1. Listener hears two messages and is asked to repeat one of them

  2. Observers noticed virtually nothing about the second message played in the other ear

  3. Might notice pitch or volume but not accurately what was spoken

  4. True even if the same word was repeated multiple times

  5. Unable to notice any differences in language in the second channel
• Cocktail party effect: In a dichotic listening task, it is found that people often recognize their own names from the unattended channel even though they were keeping up with the other one
• Attenuation Theory/Leaky Filter Model

  • Showed that in a dichotic listening task we can pick up info from the unattended channel but usually only if it important to us
  • Info leaks through and is processed
• Corteen and Wood Study

  1. Select Canadian city names paired with electric shocks until the mention of them produced a fear response measurable by galvanic skin response

  2. Then dichotic listening task performed where in the unattended channel, the city names would be played

  3. Listeners did not report hearing the city names, but a GSR was produced indicating the the info was still processed
• Deutsch-Norman's Late Selection Model


  • Suggests that all information is processed until the point at which its meaning can be accessed through long term memory, even if we are unaware of it
• Automaticity and Practice


  • With practice, a behaviour becomes more automatic, as it requires fewer attentional resources to perform
  • Can become so automatic that we can't stop it from happening
• Stroop Effect


  • Colours/words reading task
  • For expert readers it is such an automatic process that they cannot prevent it even when effects are deleterious
  • Beginner readers are not yet performing an automatic behaviour, reading is still a controlled process
• Attention Disorders


  • Stroke can lead to attention disorder
  • Most common disorder: Visual Neglect - Attentional deficit NOT sensory: a person can on the defect side but they don't attend to it
  • Right hemisphere parietal lesions cause left neglect and vice versa
  • Unilateral Neglect affects all aspects of the person's life (incl. eating, grooming, etc)
• Visual Neglect in Memory

  1. Patients are asked to pretend they are in the downtown plaza of their own they have always lived in and asked to describe what they see

  2. Patients accurately describe the right hand side of the plaza but neglect the left side

  3. Patients then asked to pretend they are standing at the other end of the plaza and once again asked to describe what they would see

  4. Again describe only the right side (which was the initial left side)

  5. Showed that the information is present in memory but patient is unable to attend to the left side of their visual memory
• • Driving Studies: Show that when trying to talk on the phone and do a task similar to driving, there are many mistakes in the task when the participant is on a phone call, or delayed reaction time
  • When listening to the radio there were much fewer errors
  • Having a passenger does not show similar results to a cell phone as they likely share joint attention
• Attention can be divided into two types, endogenous (top-down) and exogenous (bottom-up).
• The Stroop effect demonstrates the influence of both top-down and bottom-up processes on selective attention.