Problem 1
1.A
Failures of Awareness: The Case of Inattentional Blindness:
We appear only able to process only one stream of info from awareness – we only perceive the focus of our
cognitive efforts – attention.
Dichotic listening –2 different info on the ears, and they ask you to focus on 1, if the info changes on the
other ear you don’t notice it. The difference between the voices is important, if they are very similar it’s hard
to distinguish the messages. You tend to notice physical change (women’s voice men’s voice) Even if they
say your name, you’ll notice it 1/3 of the time – cognitive deafness
o This selective listening task - A method for studying selective attention in which people focus
attention on one auditory stream of information while deliberately ignoring other auditory
information. - highlight the power of attention to filter info, only letting what we want t to hear
through. But we can miss stuff that we would consider important.
This phenomenon is inattentional deafness - failure to notice unexpected sounds or voice when attention is
focused elsewhere –inattentional deafness experiment: people fail to notice someone walking and saying, “I
am a gorilla”.
Vison – (Neisser 1975) study did the dichotic listening task for vision, the subjects saw 2 videos that were
partially overlapping. They asked the subjects to focus on 1 thing, they failed to notice the unaccepted events
the participants were unaware of events happening outside the focus of their attention.
o 90s version: gorilla study
o Factors that cause people to miss events or not:
More likely to notice objects that have similar characteristics to what they are supposed to
being paying attention to (like if you’re counting the passes of the black t-shirt players)
The greater the demands on attention, the less likely people are to notice random shit
The less random the ignored elements of a scene, the less likely people are to notice
the more distracted we are, the less likely we are to be aware of our surroundings.
This phenomenon is known as Inattentional blindness - failure to notice unexpected objects or events when
attention is focused elsewhere
o Change blindness – not noticing a change in a visual pattern. Old stimuli changes into a new
stimulus. – getting a haircut and no one noticing.
Benefits of inattentional blindness – overwhelming to pay attention to everything; helps us focus on what we
want to focus on, helps working memory not be overloaded.
Individual Differences in attention – not a lot of information:
- Some studies suggest that those people who have a greater working memory capacity are more likely to
notice unexpected objects. Theory – with more resources available people should be more likely to notice
- But some studies found no relation. Theory – people with more working memory capacity end to be better at
maintaining focus.
Evolutionary, inattentional blindness didn’t have significant consequences, but now it does, because of cars, phones.
All you can do about inattentional blindness is to recognize your limitations: 1. Avoid distraction; 2. pay attention to
what other might not notice.
B
Selective Attention - the capacity for or process of reacting to certain stimuli selectively when several occur
simultaneously
Cherry, 1953 – Cocktail party problem, - builds on inattentional blindness/deafness but says that you can
notice the unattended stimuli when it is strong enough (name, screaming, weird voices). Experiment: it
shows that our inattentional blindness can be broken by the right stimuli.
o Shadowing – listening to 2 different messages, follow one and ignore the other.
, Factors to help you selectively attend to the message:
1. Distinctive sensory characteristics of the target’s speech (low pitch, pacing…)
2. Sound intensity (loudness)
3. Location of the sound source – less important
Theories of selective attention – filter theories – a filter blocks some of the information (Broadbent; Selective Filter
model; later-filter model; early-filter and later-filter model)
- bottleneck theories - a bottleneck slows down the info, minimizing or (Attenuation
model)
1. Broadbent’s Model – (Broadbent, 1958) - we filter information after we notice it at the sensory level. A lot of
sensory input reaches an attentional filter that allows only 1 channel to proceed and reach process of
perception. The channels are distinguished by characteristics like loudness, accent… other info will be filtered
out at the sensory level and never reaches perception. – supported by the cocktail phenomenon.
a. Only theory that cannot explain why your attention is caught when you hear your name (interesting
stimuli in general).
2. Selective filter model (Moray) – the selective filter blocks out most information at the sensory level. But
some personally important messages are so powerful that they burst through the filtering mechanism (ex:
your name).
3. Attenuation model (Treisman)– explored why some unattended messages pass through the filter. For ex,
participants can pick up some words of the other message or pick up if it’s the same message or bilinguals
that can hear both languages at the same time. theory of selective attention:
a. First, the filter weakens (attenuate) the strength of the unattended stimuli, we analyse it at a low
level, if it has the target properties (like your name) it goes to the next step (if not we forget it)
b. Then we analyse the meaning/relevance of the stimuli. Hence it can come to consciousness or
influence us.
4. Later-Filter Model – (Deutsch and Deutsch) (2= but the filter is later) – the stimuli is first processed for a
meaning and then filtered out after they have been analysed.
5. A Synthesis of Early-Filter and Late-Filter Models – (Neisser) - 2 process governing attention:
a. Preattentive processes: automatic/rapid proves that occur in parallel. Useful to notice physical
sensory characteristics in the unattended message. But they don’t analyse the meaning.
b. Attentive, controlled process – later process and consume time and attentional resources (ex:
working memory). Serve to analyse relationships, synthesize fragments into a mental representation
object.
c. Criticism: no clear specification on how the 2 filters interact with each other, so can’t prove it.
C
The Beneficial Effect of Concurrent Task-Irrelevant Mental Activity on Temporal Attention
Report the good effect of task-irrelevant mental activity on performance that involves paying attention to
visual input.
task – series of letters, among them 2 target digits (T1/T2) and the observer’s task to reveal them at the end
of the trial.
Assumption - Finding T2 is harder if its shortly after T1 – attentional blink – inability to identify the second
visual stimulus, your attention is taken away from the 1st stimulus. - seeing the first ting but losing the
second, because you are so focus on the fact that you caught the first one. Because is that processing of T1
takes up limited attentional resources so there’s none left for T2
GROUPS: standard info + participants should think about something else while doing the task and no
mentions of Ts + listen to music group + experiment condition
Results:
o standard group – typical of attentional blink
o 2nd group – better than 1st
o Listen to music – better than standard group, really good, attentional blink virtually disappeared
o Reward – no better than standard group
, Task may improve when the task is accompanied by a task-irrelevant mental activity. This suggests that under
conditions of rapid visual presentation, target detection may benefit from a diffusion of attention
Lag 1 on sparing – when you a make a mistake in the first task they tell you, so you get the T2 right.
Check list Problem 1
Inattentional blindness
Dichotic listening
Selective attention
Selective listening task
Inattentional deafness
Tunnel vision
Change blindness
Cocktail party effect, filter theory, bottleneck theory
Attenuation Theory
Shadowing
Broadbent
Moray
Treisman
Deutsch & Deutsch
Attentional blink
Lag 1 sparing
Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP)
