Deck 4: Attention

Question 1

Broadbent's model is called an early selection model because

A) the filtering step occurs before the meaning of the incoming information is analyzed.
B) the filtering step occurs before the information enters the sensory store.
C) only a select set of environmental information enters the system.
D) incoming information is selected by the detector.

Answer 1

the filtering step occurs before the meaning of the incoming information is analyzed.

Question 2

When Sam listens to his girlfriend Susan in the restaurant and ignores other people's conversations, he is engaged in the process of ____ attention.

A) low load
B) divided
C) cocktail party
D) selective

Answer 2

selective

Question 3

Broadbent's "filter model" proposes that the filter identifies the attended message based on

A) meaning.
B) modality.
C) physical characteristics.
D) higher order characteristics.

Answer 3

physical characteristics.

Question 4

Which of the following is most closely associated with Treisman's attenuation theory of selective attention?

A) Late selection
B) Stroop experiments
C) Precueing
D) Dictionary unit

Question 5

Dichotic listening occurs when

A) the same message is presented to the left and right ears.
B) different messages are presented to the left and right ears.
C) a message is presented to one ear, and a masking noise is presented to the other ear.
D) participants are asked to listen to a message and look at a visual stimulus, both at the same time.

Question 6

The cocktail party effect is

A) the ability to pay attention to one message and ignore others, yet hear distinctive features of the unattended messages.
B) the inability to pay attention to one message in the presence of competing messages.
C) the diminished awareness of information in a crowd.
D) the equal division of attention between competing messages.

Question 7

Colin Cherry's experiment in which participants listened to two different messages, one presented to each ear, found that people

A) could focus on a message only if they are repeating it.
B) could focus on a message only if they rehearsed it.
C) could focus on one message and ignore the other one at the same time.
D) could not focus on a message presented to only one ear.

Question 8

Which of the following would likely be an input message into the detector in Broadbent's model?

A) All messages selected by the filter
B) All messages within earshot
C) A message with a German accent
D) All sensory messages

Question 9

When a person is shadowing a message, he or she is

A) silently following it mentally.
B) ignoring it while paying attention to another message.
C) saying the message out loud.
D) thinking about something closely related to the message.

Question 10

A high threshold in Treisman's model of attention implies that

A) weak signals can cause activation.
B) it takes a strong signal to cause activation.
C) all signals cause activation.
D) no signals cause activation.

Question 11

Selection of the attended message in the Broadbent model occurs based on the

A) meaning of the message.
B) physical characteristics of the message.
C) physical characteristics of the message plus the meaning, if necessary.
D) listener's ability to mentally block the unattended message from getting in.

Question 12

The main difference between early and late selection models of attention is that in late selection models, selection of stimuli for final processing doesn't occur until the information is analyzed for

A) modality.
B) meaning.
C) physical characteristics.
D) location.

Question 13

In Broadbent's filter model, the stages of information processing occur in which order?

A) Detector, filter, sensory store, memory
B) Sensory store, filter, detector, memory
C) Filter, detector, sensory store, memory
D) Detector, sensory store, filter, memory

Question 14

Which of the following is an experimental procedure used to study how attention affects the processing of competing stimuli?

A) Early selection
B) Filtering
C) Channeling
D) Dichotic listening

Question 15

Suppose twin teenagers are vying for their mother's attention.The mother is trying to pay attention to one of her daughters, though both girls are talking (one about her boyfriend, one about a school project).According to the operating characteristics of Treisman's attenuator, it is most likely the attenuator is analyzing the incoming messages in terms of

A) physical characteristics.
B) language.
C) meaning.
D) direction.

Question 16

In a dichotic listening experiment, ______ refers to the procedure that is used to force participants to pay attention to a specific message among competing messages.

A) rehearsing
B) shadowing
C) echoing
D) delayed repeating

Question 17

According to Treisman's "attenuation model," which of the following would you expect to have the highest threshold for most people?

A) The word "house"
B) Their spouse's first name
C) The word "fire"
D) The word "platypus"

Question 18

Which experimental result caused problems for Broadbent's filter model of selective attention?

A) A result where listeners don't notice words presented up to 35 times in the unattended ear
B) A result where listeners can shadow a message presented in the attended ear
C) The result of Cherry's experiment demonstrating the cocktail party phenomenon
D) The result of the "Dear Aunt Jane" experiment

Question 19

Which stage in Treisman's "attenuation model" has a threshold component?

A) The attenuator
B) The dictionary unit
C) The filter
D) The "leaky" filter

Question 20

Suppose you are in your kitchen writing a grocery list, while your roommate is watching TV in the next room.A commercial for spaghetti sauce comes on TV.Although you are not paying attention to the TV, you "suddenly" remember that you need to pick up spaghetti sauce and add it to the list.Your behavior is best predicted by which of the following models of attention?

A) Object-based
B) Early selection
C) Spotlight
D) Late selection

Question 21

In Simons and Chabris's "change blindness" experiment, participants watch a film of people playing basketball. Many participants failed to report that that a woman carrying an umbrella walked through because the

A) woman with the umbrella was in motion, just like the players.
B) the umbrella was the same color as the floor.
C) participants were counting the number of ball passes.
D) participants were not asked if they saw anything unusual.

Question 22

According to your text, the ability to divide attention depends on all of the following EXCEPT

A) practice.
B) the type of tasks.
C) the difficulty of the tasks.
D) task cueing.

Question 23

The automatic process exhibited in the standard Stroop effect is

A) naming colors.
B) reading words.
C) naming distractors.
D) shadowing messages.

Question 24

Experiments that support the idea of early selection involve

A) simple tasks.
B) high-load tasks.
C) low-load tasks.
D) extended practice.

Question 25

Strayer and Johnston's (2001)experiment involving simulated driving and the use of "hands-free" vs."handheld" cell phones found that

A) talking on either kind of phone impairs driving performance significantly and to the same extent.
B) driving performance was impaired only with the handheld cell phones.
C) driving performance was impaired less with the hands-free phones than with the handheld phones.
D) divided attention (driving and talking on the phone) did not affect performance.

Question 26

Research on the use of cell phones while driving indicates that

A) the negative effect can be decreased by using "hands-free" units.
B) the problem with cell phones is that attention is distracted from the task of driving by the need to hold the phone and drive with one hand.
C) the main effect of cell phone use on driving safety can be attributed to the fact that attention is used up by the cognitive task of talking on the phone.
D) both a and b are correct

Question 27

Which of the following everyday scenarios is most likely to support what the early selection approach would say about how attention will affect the performance of the two tasks involved?

A) Driving home while thinking about a problem at work
B) Reading a novel while walking on a treadmill
C) Humming a familiar song while washing dishes
D) Conversing on the phone while doing a crossword puzzle

Question 28

In the flanker compatibility procedure, flanker stimuli and target stimuli must necessarily differ in terms of

A) location.
B) size.
C) identity.
D) color.

Question 29

Which of the following statements concerning the "100-car naturalistic driving study" is true?

A) Video recorders created records of both what the drivers were doing and the views out the front and rear windows.
B) Pushing buttons on a cell phone was the least distracting activity drivers performed while driving.
C) Records showed that the majority of drivers were attentive to driving during the three seconds before a near crash but inattentive during the three seconds before an actual crash.
D) All of the above

Question 30

Flanker compatibility experiments have been conducted using a variety of stimulus conditions.By definition, this procedure must include at least one target and one distractor.In any condition where we find that a distractor influenced reaction time, we can conclude that the distractor

A) was overtly responded to by the participant.
B) was processed.
C) was ignored.
D) appeared in a high-load condition.

Question 31

Imagine that U.S.lawmakers are considering changing the driving laws and that you have been consulted as an attention expert.Given the principles of consistent vs.varied mapping, which of the following possible changes to driving laws would most interfere with a skilled driver's automatic performance when driving a car?

A) Passing laws where headlights must be used during the day when the weather is bad
B) Requiring all drivers learn to drive safely on wet roadways using anti-lock brakes
C) Requiring successful curbside parking performance to obtain a license
D) Creating conditions where sometimes a green light meant "stop"

Question 32

In support of late selection models, Donald MacKay showed that the presentation of a biasing word on the unattended ear influenced participants' processing of ____ when they were ____ of that word.

A) letter pairs; aware
B) letter pairs; unaware
C) ambiguous sentences; aware
D) ambiguous sentences; unaware

Question 33

The ability to pay attention to, or carry out, two or more different tasks simultaneously is known as

A) divided attention.
B) dual attention.
C) divergent tasking.
D) selective attention.

Question 34

The Stroop effect demonstrates people's inability to ignore the ______ of words.

A) meaning
B) color
C) size
D) font

Question 35

In Schneider and Shiffrin's experiment, in which participants were asked to indicate whether a target stimulus was present in a series of rapidly presented "frames," divided attention was easier

A) in the consistent-mapping condition.
B) in the variable-mapping condition.
C) in the high-load condition.
D) for the location-based task.

Question 36

Controlled processing involves

A) close attention.
B) ease in performing parallel tasks.
C) overlearning of tasks.
D) few cognitive resources.

Question 37

The Stroop effect demonstrates

A) how automatic processing can interfere with intended processing.
B) a failure of divided attention.
C) the ease of performing a low-load task.
D) support for object-based attention.

Question 38

The Stroop effect occurs when participants

A) are told to divide their attention between colors and shapes.
B) try to name colors and ignore words.
C) try to select some incoming information based on meaning.
D) are told to shadow two messages simultaneously.

Question 39

Automatic processing occurs when

A) cognitive resources are high.
B) response times are long.
C) tasks are well-practiced.
D) attention is focused.

Question 40

With the Stroop effect, you would expect to find longest response times when

A) the color and the name matched.
B) the color and the name differed.
C) the shape and the name matched.
D) the shape and the name differed.

Question 41

According to Treisman's feature integration theory, the first stage of perception is called the _____ stage.

A) feature analysis
B) focused attention
C) preattentive
D) letter analysis

Question 42

Imagine we conducted a series of attention experiments.The idea that attention is associated with objects would be indicated if reaction time were

A) reduced when targets appeared at the site of a prior cue than if they appeared distant from a cue site.
B) reduced when targets appeared within a cued object compared to within an adjacent object.
C) increased when targets appeared within a cued object compared to within an adjacent object.
D) increased when targets appeared at the site of a prior cue than if they appeared distant from a cue site.

Question 43

Eye tracker studies investigating attention as we carry out actions such as making a peanut butter sandwich shows that a person's eye movements

A) usually followed a motor action by a fraction of a second.
B) were influenced by unusual objects placed in the scene.
C) were determined primarily by the task.
D) continually scanned all objects and areas of the scene.

Question 44

A dynamic environment, in which objects move throughout a scene, is likely to invoke ____ attention.

A) high-load
B) divided
C) location-based
D) object-based

Question 45

Automatic attraction of attention by a sudden visual or auditory stimulus is called

A) covert attention.
B) exogenous attention.
C) endogenous attention.
D) an illusory conjunction.

Question 46

Lan has no idea what she just read in her text because she was thinking about how hungry she is and what she is going to have for dinner.This is a real-world example of

A) the late-selection model of attention.
B) an object-based attentional failure.
C) inattentional blindness.
D) the cocktail party phenomenon.

Question 47

Treisman's model has been called a "leaky filter" model.Describe her model, and explain why it is "leaky." How does Treisman's model explain the results of Moray's "words in the unattended ear" experiment?

Question 48

When we search a scene, initial fixations are most likely to occur on ____ areas.

A) high-load
B) low-load
C) high-saliency
D) low-saliency

Question 49

Location-based attention is when

A) the enhancing effect of attention spreads throughout an object.
B) attention is divided across two or more tasks simultaneously.
C) people move their attention from one place to another.
D) attention affects an entire object, even if it is occluded by other objects.

Question 50

In Klin and coworkers' research that investigated autistic reactions to the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, autistic people primarily attended to ____ in the scene.

A) objects
B) actions of the characters
C) the facial reactions of people
D) none of the above

Question 51

Define automatic processing.Describe the research by Shiffrin and Schneider, which showed how practice can affect our ability to do multiple tasks simultaneously.In your description, clearly distinguish between consistent and varied mapping, both in terms of procedure and results.

Question 52

Define change blindness.Explain two sets of experimental data that illustrate this phenomenon.

Question 53

Illusory conjunctions are

A) combinations of features from different stimuli.
B) misidentified objects using the context of the scene.
C) combinations of features from the masking field and the stimuli.
D) features that are consistent across different stimuli.

Question 54

Scene schema is

A) rapid movements of the eyes from one place to another in a scene.
B) short pauses of the eyes on points of interest in a scene.
C) how attention is distributed throughout a static scene.
D) knowledge about what is contained in a typical scene.

Question 55

Results of precueing experiments show that participants respond more rapidly to a stimulus that appeared at the ____ location.

A) fixated
B) cued
C) rightmost
D) topmost

Question 56

The use of an eye tracker can help reveal the shifting of one's attention.

A) overt
B) covert
C) divided
D) dichotic

Question 57

Colby and coworkers' study showed that a monkey's parietal cortex responded best to the appearance of a light when it was the focus of the monkey's

A) attention.
B) eyes.
C) fixation.
D) all of the above

Question 58

Lavie showed how results that appear contradictory (some supporting early selection, others supporting late selection)can all be explained by the same general principle.What is this principle? Explain the experimental results to support your conclusions.

Question 59

Describe Moray's "words in the unattended ear" experiment.Why does this research pose a problem for Broadbent's filter model? Specifically, what does this research say about its classification as an early selection model?

Question 60

A bottom-up process is involved in fixating on an area of a scene that

A) has high stimulus salience.
B) fits with the observer's interests.
C) is familiar.
D) carries meaning for the observer.

Question 61

Compare and contrast location- and object-based attention.Give a set of experimental results to support each type of model.