Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 3rd Edition

7. Describe physiological research on how covert attention infl uences neural
   responding in monkeys and in humans. What is the evidence that attentional
   processing is distributed throughout the brain?


8. How do eye movements of autistic and normally developing people compare?

CHAPTER SUMMARY

1. Selective attention, the ability to focus on one message
   while ignoring all others, has been demonstrated using
   the dichotic listening procedure.


2. A number of models have been proposed to explain the
   process of selective attention. Broadbent’s filter model
   proposes that the attended message is separated from
   the incoming signal early in the analysis of the signal.
   Treisman’s model proposes later separation and adds a
   dictionary unit to explain how the unattended message
   can sometimes get through. Late selection models pro-
   pose that selection doesn’t occur until messages are pro-
   cessed enough to determine their meaning.


3. The flanker compatibility task has been used to determine
   how cognitive load affects attention. Generally, when the
   load is low, task-irrelevant stimuli are processed even if
   the observer is focusing attention on another stimulus.
   However, when the load is high, task-irrelevant stimuli
   are not processed.


4. The Stroop effect demonstrates how a powerful task-
   irrelevant stimulus, such as meaningful words that result
   in a response that competes with the observer’s task, can
   capture attention.


5. Divided attention is possible for easy tasks, or for highly
   practiced difficult tasks. In these situations, automatic
   processing is possible. Divided attention for highly
   demanding tasks requires controlled processing.


6. Driver inattention is one of the major causes of automo-
   bile accidents. There is evidence that using cell phones dur-
   ing driving is associated with increases in traffic accidents
   and decreases in performance of driving-related tasks.


7. Inattentional blindness and change blindness experi-
   ments provide evidence that without attention we may

fail to perceive things that are clearly visible in the field

of view.

8. Eye movements are mechanisms of overt attention. Overt
   attention is determined by bottom-up processes such as
   stimulus salience and by top-down processes such as
   scene schemas and task demands, which influence how
   eye movements are directed to parts of a scene.


9. Visual attention can be directed to different places in
   a scene even without eye movements, a process called
   covert attention. The effect of covert attention has been
   demonstrated by precueing experiments, which have
   shown that covert attention to a location enhances pro-
   cessing at that location. This is called location-based
   attention.


10. Object-based attention occurs when attention is directed
    toward specific objects. The enhancing effects of atten-
    tion spread throughout an object; this is called the same-
    object advantage.


11. Feature integration theory proposes two stages of pro-
    cessing: preattentive processing and focused attention.
    The basic idea is that objects are analyzed into their fea-
    tures and attention is necessary to combine these features
    to create perception of an object.


12. Covert attention enhances responding in single neurons
    in the monkey brain and increases activity in a number
    of areas of the human brain. fMRI experiments have
    shown that attention causes distributed activity across
    the cortex.


13. People with autism do not direct their attention in social
    situations in the same way as nonautistic observers.
    Autistic people attend to things, where nonautistic peo-
    ple attend more to other people.

Think ABOUT IT

1. Pick two items from the following list, and decide how
   difficult it would be to do both at the same time. Some
   things are difficult to do simultaneously because of physical
   limitations. For example, it would be extremely difficult
   to dance while rock climbing! Others things are difficult
   to do simultaneously because of cognitive limitations. For
   each pair of activities that you pick, decide why it would
   be easy or difficult to do them simultaneously. Be sure to
   take the idea of cognitive load into account.

Driving a car Talking on a cell phone

Reading a book for pleasure Flying a kite

Doing math problems Walking in the woods

Talking to a friend Listening to a story

Thinking about tomorrow Writing a paper for class

Rock climbing Dancing

THINK ABOUT IT

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