Attentional Capture

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

Attention is thought to be selective-focused on one subject at a time. Traditionally, it has been assumed that automatic processing is involuntary, it does not require attention, and is relatively fast; whereas, controlled processing is voluntary, does require attention, and is relatively slow. We can conclude from this that the more we repeat a certain material or tasks the more it becomes automatic and effortless to us.

The purpose of the study was to measure the effect that the Flicker Paradigm had on visual perception. The Flicker Paradigm causes a distraction while there is a change made in the image. It was designed to test how long the groups took to react to a change in the visual field. The test is meant to show that the disturbance in the visual field made it much more challenging for the viewer to notice any changes that were made in the image. The hypothesis stated that the experimental group, the group using the Flicker Paradigm, would take longer to notice the change in the visual field than the control group, which had no flicker between the altered images. This is because the disturbance in the visual field caused the brain to miss the change that was made to the image because the information was deemed as unimportant. The majority of the perceived changes occurred in the background of the scene, and were considered minor in reference to the whole scene. This was proven true from the data collected, and coincided with previous tests. (Rensink, R. A. 2000). The data in tables 1.1 and 1.3 shows the individual participant data for the test with a flicker for both tests one and two. Tables 1.2 and 1.4 represent the individual results for the tests with no flicker, or the control group. Graphs 1.1 and 1.2 showed the relationship between the time taken to recognize alterations in the images. The data was taken from the average time to recognize the change from all

Ullsperger, Bylsma, and Botvinick (2005) investigated whether the findings of Mayr, Awh, and Laurey (2003) can be replicated and how much they can be shown across different task performances. Their specific study was motivated by a prior experiment where Gratton, Coles, and Donchin (1992) found that after an incompatible type trial reaction times were reduced and target processing occurred more frequently than flanker processing on the next trial. Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, and Cohen (2001) believed that this follows the conflict monitoring hypothesis where incompatible trials involve a conflict with the response leading to greater top-down information processing (Botvinick, Nystrom, Fissell, Carter, & Cohen, 1999). However, Mayr et. al (2003) argued that the congruency sequence effect found by Gratton et al. (1992) was due to repetition priming because of stimulus repeats in a flanker task. This may have led to a faster reaction time with repeated trials. Mayr et al. (2003) used two experiments to present evidence for their argument. Both experiments failed to show the effect found by Gratton et al. (1992) when target and stimulus items did not repeat from trial to trial.

Change blindness shows surprising perception phenomenon that is noticed through the visual change of stimulus introduced and observers do not notice the change. When observer fails to observe and notice the change major changes and differences introduced into an image at a flick off and on again. People having poor ability in detecting the changes are argued to have limitation of human attention (Hecht-Nielsen & McKenna, 2003). Change blindness has provided a wide range of research that has important and practical implications especially in eyewitness position and distraction while driving among other areas.

The Stroop effect was tested on four different tasks. Nineteen Queens College students were recruited by flyer, and each were assigned to a word reading task, color reading task, color inhibition task, and word inhibition task. They were timed using a stopwatch function on a cell phone, to name the color, or word to the quickest of their ability. In the order from longest reaction time to shortest: inhibition color naming task, color naming task, inhibition word reading, and word reading. This study shows that people can read words more quickly than they can name colors, and that inhibiting an automatic response to color/word tasks will take longer to do than tasks that do not involve inhibition.

Evidence for space-based attention comes primarily from a variety of cuing tasks, which assume that reaction time for detecting a target indicates processing efficiency. Since attention enhances processing efficiency, one would expect that reaction times are faster for attended features, and slower for unattended ones. For example, Posner (1980) showed that target letters were identified more quickly when they had been pre-cued by a dot in the same location. This suggests that attention was directed at the cued region of space. Egly and Homa (1984) used a task in which a general circular area was pre-cued. They found that stimulus detection was

seconds after cue appearance. The time windows for the neutral task N2 and the social task S2

This study examined whether participant’s response times to global target were faster than local targets. Participants had to identify global and local shapes and letters as quick as possible and the response times which were recorded to the computer data. The study was a replication of Navon’s (1977), (cited in Ness Smith and Thirkettle, 2014) experiment but differed, as it was a focused attention task whereas this experiment was a divided attention task. This was the same as Yovel (2001), (cited in Ness, Smith and Thirkettle, 2014) mixed attention task study which tested the global to local accounts. The current

Powell (1986) conducted a study in which individuals viewed a photo or slide. Individuals were required to scan images and decide on an image for the entire display (Powell, 1986). Objects were pointed to, and subjects were asked to identify its location (Powell, 1986). The subject was asked to close his or her eyes and were shown another image. The subjects were to decide if the object was in the correct position (Powell, 1986). The subjects would hear one of the objects and was required to focus on the object while keeping the entire image in his or her mind (Powell, 1986). When the next object was identified, the subjects were to move from the first object to the second watching a black dot moving in a straight line (Powell, 1986).

Reaction time is the interval of time it takes for someone to detect something and to react to it. For an average driver with no distractions, it can take them around 1.5 seconds to react. If they were distracted, from music or mobile phones, it could take them up to 3 seconds to react.

Early studies have widely researched attention with selective processing (Driver, 2001). Broadbent (1958) filter theory of attention states that certain information does not require focal attention. It is based on certain stimulus attributes such as colour and shape (Friedenberg, 2012). A previous study carried out by Treisman and Schmidt (1982) proposes that when attention is diverted from a display of several figures, the participants incorrectly combine the features of colour and shape therefore increases the illusory conjunctions portrayed by the participants (Tsal, 1989). Another study by Shaw (1978) found that reaction time of participant to identify targets varied with the probability that a target would appear in a particular display location. These results indicate that different amounts of attention towards the targets are distributed to different positions in the visual field. However, Houck and Hoffman (1986) found that the feature integration of colour and orientation can sometimes be accomplished without attention (James et al.,

In this lab, the team concluded that being distracted with an activity that diverts optical attention away from the focal point, such as texting, significantly increases reaction time. The other distractors, including listening to music and talking on a cell phone, had effectively no impact on reaction time in comparison to having no distraction.

The reaction time (RT) of students was measured in the experiment to determine whether light or sound stimulus initiates a quicker response time. The question of whether or not RT was related to movement time (MT) was also challenged. Each student performed two test in random order; one testing the reaction time of a red light stimulus, or visual reaction time (VRT); and the other testing the reaction time of a “beeping” sound stimulus, or auditory reaction time (ART). The student completed the VRT trial by simply receiving the stimulus and pressing a button. The student placing and holding their hand on a button starts the ART trial. Once the student receives the stimulus (beep) they press the adjacent button as fast as they can. The ART trial does not only include the data of the RT, but also the data from the MT. Having previous knowledge that light travels faster than sound; one can predict that VRT is faster than ART. The prediction that MT is independent upon RT can be made with the thought that there are so many opposing variables that could affect the MT of an individual unrelated RT such as old age

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.