Cherry's Summarization And Appropriate Attention

The Stroop effect is demonstrated by the reaction time to determine a color when the color is printed in a different color’s name. Participants respond slower or make more errors when the meaning of the word is incongruent with the color of the word. Despite knowing the meaning of the word, participants showed incapability of ignoring the stimulus attribute. This reflects a clear instance of semantic interference and an unfathomed failure of selective attention (Stroop, 1935).

Suppose another experiment had participants say the word “now” as soon as they detected the green circle, and that the response times were between 100 and 200 milliseconds. What would you conclude about the cognitive tasks involved in these two versions of simple detection?

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 cocktail-party effect was investigated in early studies of selective attention. It was first described by Cherry (1953). It’s the observation that even in a noisy environment people are able to focus their attention on who is talking to them. Cherry (1953) investigated this phenomenon by conducting a series of dichotic listening and

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

The results show that although the primacy effect was apparent in the results of both tests, the recency effect was not observed in Test 2(as predicted) and strangely not observable in Test 1 either. The reason for this may be the presence of uncontrolled external stimuli caused between the participants listening time and

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

As for the evidence of the working memory system, two British researches, Alan Baddley and Graham Hitch, have proposed a model in how to explain the working memory system. They have suggested that the system contains many different parts, and that the main working part of the system is the central executive. This central part is able to delegate tasks for the low-level “assistants” to handle, since these assistants are not able to actually analyze a situation on their own. The articulatory rehearsal loop is one of the assistances that allows a person to remember, and is the most beneficial in many ways. This assistant allows you to recall information that is previously stated by repetitively stating the information in our head, which is known as subvolcalization, or silent speech. Furthermore, Baddley and Hitch’s model suggest that we are able to see the existence of this working memory through “sound-alike” errors, because our bodies rely on this rehearsal loop or memory to recall information. In a study, there was a control group which was given a normal digit-span test. In the other group, people were asked to perform concurrent articulation when they took the test. Although this concurrent articulation is not difficult, it does affect the use of the articulatory loop and decreases the memory. With that being said, manipulation of a

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.,

This study was a seminal replication on attention blink similar to the one done by Raymond et al, in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. This study predicted that there would be a higher accuracy for identifying the first target, T1 and lower accuracy for the second target, T2 depending on the lag, given that T1 was accurately reported. 193 students participated in the experiment. This experiment was a part of the course requirement. There was a stream of 19 letters, each lasting for 100 ms. The target letters, T1 and/or T2, to be identified were either a ‘J’ or a ‘K’ or both from the stream of 19 letters presented. In this study, a total of 60 trials were conducted for each participant. For T1, there were 30 ‘J’ and 30 ‘K’ targets. T2 comprised of 24 J, 24 K and 12 null targets. The participants were asked to decide whether they saw the letters J, K, both or neither following the RSVP stream. They were asked to do so by using a button click mechanism. At the end of all the trials, the participants were presented with a summary of their performance report. It was observed that the percentage of T1 reported does not vary significantly as a function of lag. Also, the percentage of T2 reported varied as a function of lag. At greater lag positions, it was seen that the percentage of T2 reported goes above that of T1.

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

Late selection models provide a possible explanation for results obtained in some dichotic listening experiments where processing of unattended stimuli did seem to take place. For example, Corteen and Wood (1972, as cited in Naish, 2010), paired electric shocks with certain words, so that a conditioned galvanic skin response (GSR) took place. Later, when these words were again presented to the unattended ear , (without electric shocks), the GSR still occurred for these words as well as other words from the same category, indicating that processing for meaning had indeed taken place. Late section theories could also be used to explain the cocktail party effect (Naish , 2010) i.e. if someone is attending to one conversation at a party and their name is mentioned in another conversation in the room, they are able to hear their name and switch their

The speech perception study conducted by Johnstrude and his colleagues in 2013 was an in-depth investigation of selective attention, focusing on the interrelation of hearing and familiarity. The purpose of the experiment was to examine the variations of people’s attending and shadowing ability when letting them listen to two simultaneous voices, manipulating the volumes and the timbres. Johnstrude set three conditions: familiar target voice and novel masker voice, novel target and familiar masker, and novel baseline (both voices are novel). Johnstrude found that participants excelled at the first condition, while the other two were inferior at the beginning but tend to increase and converge. Also, participants’ performance decreased

Research carried out on attention has mainly been associated with the selective processing of incoming sensory information. It proposes, to some degree, our awareness of the world depends on what we choose to focus on and not simply the stimulation received by our senses. Attention is often linked to a filter that screens out most potential stimuli whilst allowing a select few to pass through into our conscious awareness, however, a great deal of debate has been devoted to where the filter is situated in the information processing chain (Martindale, 1991). Psychologists have made extensive contributions to this subject matter in the past century. Notable examples include Donald Broadbent's filter theory of attention (1958), which set the

Eight students participated in a study of the Irrelevant Speech Effect. Irrelevant speech disrupts immediate serial recall. In this study we test the disruptive effects of irrelevant speech on serial recall. In this experiment participants saw a list of randomly ordered digits 1-9. During the some trials they heard irrelevant speech in the background, while other trials were quiet. This irrelevant speech was a passage from Franz Kafka in German (Francis, Neath, & VanHorn, 2008). We found a main effect of Trial Type, which were the quiet and irrelevant speech background conditions. This is evidence that the irrelevant speech effect did take place.