Adequate Observation Report

In the first phase of this study that was based around recognising global features, the letters used were large H’s or S’s. In the second phase, global letters of H, S and O were used and were made up of smaller H’s or S’s, the local characters. These make up the 3 stimulus types: congruent, neutral and conflicting. The large and small letters could be combined to create 3 types of displays: 1) Consistent, where the large and small letters were the same (H printed from small H’s, or S made of small S’s). 2) Conflicting (H made of small S’s, S made of small H’s), and 3) Neutral (H made of O’s, S made of

The article by Avital-Cohen and Tsal (2016) discussed the flanker task experiment, which asserted that distractor interference happens unconsciously as a result of focused attention toward the target. The results from the original flanker task indicated that participants had slower responses for incongruent trials, since the distractors are inconsistent with the target and would require a different response (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). However, Avital-Cohen and Tsal (2016) questioned the findings from the flanker task experiment. They decided to challenge the idea that only the target stimuli receives top-down processing, and not the distractors (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). The first experiment aimed to test whether the distractor interference is purely bottom-up processing as claimed in the flanker task. The experiment manipulated participants’ expectations of the target using the context effect - a type of top-down processing - by changing the distractors to be either letters or digits (Psych 240 lecture, 9/21/16). Then, the researchers conducted a second experiment and eliminated the ambiguity of distractors. They wanted to test whether the result from experiment 1 was caused by an overall bias or the ambiguous distractors. In experiment 2, the researchers predicted that they would obtain similar results to the first experiment only if the results were due to an overall bias effect (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). This study allows us to deepen our understanding of available

This was achieved by presenting central cues, indicating the position of the target letter thus increasing focus. Through these experiments they found that when a subject is in a diffuse attention state (unfocussed) SOD do cause attentional capture and increase reaction time. However, if the subject was presented with a cue this same increase in reaction time was not observed. This led them to conclude that attentional capture from SOD is not automatic and instead propose a priority based visual attention system. In 2006 Neo and Chua conducted research which built upon Yantis and Jonides’ to further demonstrate effects of attentional capture on reaction time. They investigated whether sporadic use of the SOD increased the effect of attentional capture as well as investigated whether maintaining the same position for the target letter decreased reaction times. They found that SOD attentional capture did affect reaction times and unlike in Yantis and Jonides’ experiment they concluded SOD did trigger an automaticity response when used

In experiment 1, participants were instructed to press a key to determine if the stimulus was red, blue, yellow, or green. On the second half of the experiment, the stimulus appeared in grey with only one colored letter which was positioned randomly. Error rates for the experiment were below 2.5% for each condition, which is quite low. Experiment 2 was the same as experiment 1 except that there were 114 data collections instead of 288 and there were 36 practice trials instead of 72. According to experiment 1 and 2 it is suggested that the effect of

An interesting challenge arises when a task such as color naming is identified as both controlled and automatic, by varying the other task involved. Color naming is identified as a controlled process when the other task is word reading, but as an automatic process when the other task is shape naming. Cohen, Dunbar and McClelland (1990) proposed an alternative explanation of the Stroop effect, which does not distinguish between automatic and controlled processing. Instead, they proposed that automaticity is a range, and that Stroop interference depends on the relative degree of learning the particular tasks, not on processing speed.

After the 15 words, 16 buttons appear with words and the participant is then asked to recall the original 15 words presented in the list in no order. Some words were original list words, and others were the distracters or lures, related and unrelated. Once they are done, the participants are asked to move on to the next trial, to start with the next sequence of 15 words. The independent variable of this study is the original list words, and unrelated distractor words not on the list and the related distractor words, not on the list. The dependent variable is the percentage of each type of words

The current study examined the impact of a distractor task involving similar or dissimilar material on the learning of different stimuli sets (consonants vs. digits). Although there may be different rates of recall between the stimuli sets, the primary hypothesis is that there will be an interaction effect between the different stimuli sets and the material presented in the distractor task. Specifically, individuals attempting to recall a learned set of consonants are predicted to have a lower rate of recall when a distracter task involves the processing of unrelated words as compared to the processing of numbers. Conversely, individuals attempting to recall a learned set of digits are to have a lower rate of recall when a distractor task involves

The results of Roediger and McDermott’s experiment were very significant. The participants recalled the critical distractor words 40% of the time compared to 14% recall of the normal distractor words. When they

We are replicating J.R. Stroop’s original experiment The Stroop Effect (Stroop, 1935). The aim of the study was to understand how automatic processing interferes with attempts to attend to sensory information. The independent variable of our experiment was the three conditions, the congruent words, the incongruent words, and the colored squares, and the dependent variable was the time that it took participants to state the ink color of the list of words in each condition. We used repeated measures for the experiment in order to avoid influence of extraneous variables. The participants were 16-17 years of age from Garland High School. The participants will be timed on how long it takes them to say the color of the squares and the color of the words. The research was conducted in the Math Studies class. The participants were aged 16-17 and were students at Garland High School. The results showed that participants took the most time with the incongruent words.

Conjunction feature search involves visual features of objects in the environment which are processed together and does not depend on attention. However, the simple feature search requires features to combine to form objects, It requires attention to bind the primitive features into conjunctions. It is a slower process than conjunction search as it requires to scan the whole scene which is therefore time consuming (Gelade et al., 1980). The hypothesis of the present study predicts that the participants will react quicker to the simple feature condition compared to the conjunction feature condition when presented with targets in different display sizes. Also, that the display sizes would have a larger effect on the conjunction feature search compared to the simple feature

Support for Treisman’s attenuation model emanates from the findings of Cherry and Kruger (1983). In the presence of a distractor in the non-shadowed channel, particularly semantic, the ability of learning-disabled children to point to pictures relating to words in the shadowed channel was significantly worse, highlighting an inability to control the attenuation of non-shadowed messages. Since a matched-pairs design was used, extraneous variables such as individual differences were reduced, which increases our confidence in the findings. Although, like in many other attention studies, the DLT is artificial, making it difficult to generalise findings from the

The effect of interference on cognitive processes has been studied to find a correlation between automatic and controlled processes. A study by Klein (1964), on how word meaning influences color naming has been attacked from a host of different angles (MacLeod 1991). His goal was to understand the sources of the word's interfering effect in color naming and the processes involved in that interference (MacLeod 1991). The stimulus Klein used were the manipulation of four words to four ink colors presented on cards. His independent variables included, color words, common words, and unpronounceable nonsense syllables. Klein had recorded reaction times for the stimulus cards and his findings resulted in color words that averaged 81.5 s, common words (e.g. “put”, “heart”, “take”) averaged at 56 s, and unpronounceable nonsense syllables (e.g. “hjh”, “evgjc”) averaged at 49 s. Unpronounceable nonsense syllables might be unfair to use for the experiment because this stimuli is more discernible when in comparison to pronounceable and common words. A more efficient control group can be pseudo words such as English words that follow pronunciation rules and are word-like.

Klein’s (1964) implicated that the interfering effect became increasingly larger when words were more meaningful and closely colour-related, showing a highly significant difference among conditions (p<0.001). Result of the time increment between the six experimental conditions and the Colour-naming task followed the same pattern as Klein’s (1964): interference was the least for letter strings (nonsense syllables), and increased progressively to low-frequency (rare) neutral words, high-frequency neutral words, high-frequency (common) colour-related words, and other-colour (distant colour-names) words, and greatest interference was found in the classic Stroop (close colour-names) condition. The pattern supported the second hypothesis, that the Stroop effect would be small or lessened for colour-unrelated words such as letter strings (nonsense syllables). Klein (1964) demonstrated that the trend of the time increment among the experimental conditions could be interpreted by our semantic networks. As the processing time was longer for meanings (semantics) of the words than nonsense and phonemics, a reading delay was subsequently created by the effort to restrain one of the conflicting responses. Although the results of the experiment replicated with Klein’s (1964), the time increment among the six experimental conditions were generally smaller than his, which could be possibly explained by the different sample sizes. Compared to the 90 participants in Klein’s experiment, the small sample size of 32 participants in this experiment might generate less varied results due to fewer individual

Have you ever wondered why it is challenging to complete assigned tasks? Although sometimes lack of motivation and attention are the usual explanations, interference is a common and overlooked reason, too. Interference is when an automatic process hinders your ability to complete the assigned task, and it can be studied when the assigned task and automatic process are occurring simultaneously. Investigating the role of interference in completing tasks has been a long-term investigation in psychology. The most influential work done to test interference is Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions by J. Ridley Stroop. He created the original methods of testing interference. Stroop’s (1935) experiment presented inherent and conflicting stimuli simultaneously to the subjects without any previous exposure. The inherent stimuli created were color names written in an incongruent text

Introduction: We use our attention to search for things on a day-to-day basis, whether complex or basic. Items we are searching for are noticed easier when there are many of the same different items (distractors) around the one we are searching for. It helps the item we are searching for stand out. When there is more than one different, kind of distractor around the item (target) it makes it harder for us to find to find it. Mackintosh (1975) states, in order to have selective attention we learn to watch or ignore the stimuli depending on its relevance to what we are looking for. We also learn “inverse relationship” between the different stimuli. If stimuli increase the other, stimuli will decrease and vice versa. We use these ideas when we were looking for a certain stimulus and we have to find it in different scenes of varied other stimuli (distractors). According to Treisman and Gelade (1980), the theory tells us that attention has to be individually directed to each dependent stimulus regardless of the distractions surrounding it. One stimulus has to be easily distinguishable to be detected as different. In order to find the target crowded by the various distractors, we have to make sure we specifically focus our attention on just finding that one stimulus and not the distractors. According to Treisman (1982), when searching for the dependent stimulus in a scene with other different stimuli, we scan the scene in groups rather than by each