Cognitive Psychology: Thinking and Remembering (FSWP2014A)
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2.1C cognitive Psychology: Thinking and Remembering Summary
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Cognitive Psychology: Thinking and Remembering (FSWP2014A)
Institution
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (EUR)
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Cognitive Psychology: Thinking and Remembering (FSWP2014A)
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Cognitive Psychology:
2.1.C Thinking and Remembering
1. Wheres your head at?
inattentional blindness : failure to notice unexpecte if attention focused else
Ex. police man didnt notice incident while running past
o In gorilla exp. More likely to notice gorilla if paying attention to black shirt
team than white shirt team
perceive only what has the attention→ cognitive effort needed
We tend to notice stimuli that have similar characteristics to the target stimulus (inattentional
bias)
cognitive deaf due to selected attention
rapidly task switch no multitask
not expected to look out for unexpected and 1 task focused
can only perceive one stream of info at a time and filter others→ not aware
It is functional because you can allocate more of your energy to the task at hand, making it an
evolutionary advantage; maybe there were less unexpected elements before (hence why they
are unexpected), and now more exterior stimuli.
And maybe we don’t know how much we experience it because we don’t see the said
unexpected elements on a daily basis.
The results of all the experiments show Inattentional blindness
People are more likely to notice unexpected objects that share features with the items
in a display (e.g., if the gorilla was white)
Another factor that influences noticing objects is the effort you put into the attention
demanding task
For example when you have to track faster moving objects you dedicate all your
attention to tracking that object → shows how limited attention is
limited attentional capacity
Neisser, 1979 → designed a variant of his original task to test the power of selective attention
to induce failure of awareness (very similar to the gorilla video we watched)
far worse without inanttentional blindness→ In order not to get overwhelmed by the
information
Inattentional blindness occurs when you arent paying attention
while attentional blink occurs while you are paying attention
. Ex. gorilla exp didnt know what to expect (inattentional blindness) and attentional blink
they are aware of the task
,dichotic listening task:
→ when someone is listening to different sounds in each ear and you focus on one of the
sounds
2 speech streams → repeat one not notice changes in other
Affected by loudness, pitch
Leads to cognitive deafness due to selective listening
You have a headphone on and you are listening to 2 people speak at the same time but you
are asked to repeat the person in your left ear as quickly and accurately as you can. You tend
to miss any changes in language/comprehensibility of the speech. You may only notice big
physical changes (like the speaker going from male to female)
process of receiving different auditory messages presented simultaneously to each ear.
Not noticing a switch in language in one of the ears throughout the task is very
common
Dichotic listening refers to the procedure whereby a separate message is administered to each
ear.
Shadowing refers to the participant's task to attend to one of those messages.
Different versions of the dichotic listening test:
participants didn’t notice a change in semantics or language (even backwards)
however they noticed the change from male to female voice
30% shifted attention when hearing their name
choosing to focus on one sound
Task switching was intentional and an alternative to multitasking
Factors affecting:
o sound intensity
o distinctive sensory characteristics
o location (turning your ear towards the source)
o gestures (reading lips for example)
selective listening:filter info from awareness
The selective listening task: Highlights the power of blocking out extraneous information to
keep our focus on one thing we want to focus on. It can still a have consequences tho and that
is that we may miss the most important things that are happening
Theses issues are the same for visual tasks (the gorilla experiment or the umbrella
woman by Neisser)
,dichotic (visual) : overlapping events, partially transparent, same space→ both sensory
signal
Dichotic presentation
the visual version of the listening
monitor event→ fail notice→ stuff happen but not know meaning→ limited
attentional capacity
more likely to notice if unexpected shares features with attended
depends on how much effort put in demanded task→ more dedicated→ more likely
miss
Neisser & Becken 1975 → devised a visual analogue of the dichotic listening task
Two distinct but partially transparent videos with a bit of overlap. E.g. one with a
hand-clapping game and another with ball passing.
Participants often failed to notice unexpected events in the ignored video stream →
they were unaware of events happening outside the focus of their attention.
Two teams (black and & white) passing a ball, the people were slightly transparent
and occupied the same space in the video
Halfway throughout the video a woman in a raincoat and umbrella walks through
Participants were so focused on the ball passing that they often missed the “umbrella
woman”
Simon and Chabris (1999) → replicated Neisser’s work
Designed the ‘Monkey business illusion’
This time, no transparency and filmed with only one camera
Participants still failed to notice the gorilla ~50% of the time
Intuition → everyone’s intuition says that we don’t miss events or object, counterintuitive
however because it is very hard for an individual to notice something they have missed by
themselves (no scientist telling us what it is we missed). Our personal experiences deceive
us… “mistaken intuition”
(Individual) differences in noticing/attention
the effort of the task you’re focusing on
personal significance
if the unexpected object is similar to the focused object it is easier to notice
studies suggest that people with greater working memory capacity are better at
noticing unexpected events
however other studies suggest that people with a bigger working memory capacity
are not more likely to spot an unlikely object or event
inattentional deafness: condition focus attention→ hear less unattended
inattentional deafness → failure to identify a certain noise while listening to one thing
Inattentional blindness → related to visual
, o Exp. pedestrian on a call, didnt notice cycling clown because they were
distracted
when listening to a set of localized conversations over headphones, people often fail to hear
the voice of a person walking through the scene repeating “I am a gorilla”
unaware of failure to detect → confident would notice
1. experience is misleading
2. unexpected occurs infrequently
nattentional deafness vs. dichotic listening: consider how many messages are being
communicated in each task and which one of these go unnoticed
1. the inattentional deafness experiments tests auditory inattentional blindness (you
listen to a message and you don’t hear when someone talks about gorillas) while the
dichotic experiments also tests shadowing (conscious switching attention from one
hear to another).
****is the same concept as inattentional blindness. When they are listening to two different
audios and they are asked to pay attention to something else they can miss important/unusual
things happening in the audio.
Auditory distraction can induce real-world failure to see. E.g., when someone is
driving while talking on the phone they may not see important things that are
happening
Moral of the story: focused attention causes us to see and hear far less of the unattended
information than we might expect. Depending on how similar the unexpected thing is to the
ignored elements and how distracted you are
Evolutionary perspective
o Ability to focus intently assisted survival and overcame inattentional
blindness/deafness in survival situations
o Increased needs to train focus nowadays
Ex. driving car while calling need to be extra focused
mostly focused on phrase being missed out
Is everyone susceptible to this inattentional blindness/deafness?
→ Answer is still controversial
1. Studies suggest that those who have a greater working memory capacity are more
likely to notice the unexpected event.
2. Other studies don’t suggest that and don’t find such a relationship.
Working memory
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