10 13 15 PSY 317 Notes Housekeeping Assignment 3 is due next week Exam due will occur during the following week o Look at the syllabus and shift those two things down one week Assignment 3 o www gocognitive net Face Study two day experiment make sure you give yourself time For this assignment you ll only have to report about the first day After the first day come back the next day and do the second day o Even though you only have to report on the first day Assignment 4 plays off of the second day so you will need to complete it Recap Inattentional Blindness This concept will likely appear on the exam Basically if you are focusing on something else other things might slip past you o Ex Basketball video Students were asked to count how many times people with white shirts passed a basketball around About 50 of the people who watch this video do not notice the dancing gorilla that passes through o Ex The Door Study Some asks someone else for directions then switches with another person as two people carrying a door pass by Bottleneck Theory when not all information can get in only some things get through o Ex Traffic jam when there is traffic congestion only a few cars are able to change lanes and squeeze through o Older theory Filter Theories not o Selective selected information gets through while irrelevant information does o Booster sometimes attention is attenuated to what you are supposed to attend to Is Attention Necessary for Perception Inattentional blindness suggests that we do not perceive events if we do not attend to them o In other words if you did not attend to the dancing gorilla in the basketball video then we did not actually see it o However it is more about conscious perception Muller Lyer Illusion Line judgements o After multiple trials of a line judgment task participants do not notice the M L lines but their perception is affected by the M L lines This suggests that attention is necessary for conscious perception but NOT unconscious perception 10 13 15 Is Attention an Early or Late Process Change Blindness directly looking at it Early v Late Selection o In some cases people can miss changes to an object even though they are o Change blindness shows us that people can miss what is right before their eyes Is this a perceptual issue or a memory issue o Early selection processing stimuli receives little consideration if at all at the perceptual level Ex Selective furnishing for your new place o Aunt Mildred offers you an ugly vase but you deny it because you do not want it o Late selection processing all stimuli is perceived but weeded out somewhere higher into cognitive processing Ex Take all the free stuff and then get rid of stuff later o You accept Aunt Mildred s ugly vase as well as a bunch of other stuff and tell yourself you ll get rid of it later Evidence for both we ll discuss how resource theory may justify why both can coexist Spatial Attention Class Exercise Imagine driving in a bad snowstorm with very low visibility o What is your level of attention to the road like during the storm compared to nicer weather Attention is focused on one specific area of space You do not notice billboards funny bumper stickers people on the side of the road etc o All you see is the road ahead of you Attention gets the spotlight o Some cognitive psychologists conceptualize attention like a spot light Even in normal situations we focus our ears or eyes to what we are trying to attend to Ex Tilting your head to hear in a noisy environment squinting to focus adjusting head to put what we want to attend to in focus etc While we adjust our ears and or eyes it is attention that we are focusing on not just eye and ear movements Attentional effect seen before movement p 136 of textbook Divided Attention Introduction 10 13 15 o Spatial Attention the ability to focus on a particular position in space and be prepared for a stimulus to appear in that location Spatial cueing of attention Posner Cueing Task Participants press a button whenever they see the cue of a star or asterisk pop up on the screen and their reaction speed is measured o Valid Cues 80 of the trial o Invalid Cues 20 of the trial o We have discussed in depth how you might selectively attend to an event ignoring irrelevant distractions information at once However there are many instances where we attend to multiple bits of Divided attention effort to split your attention between multiple tasks or inputs at the same time Multi tasking Ex Driving while talking on the phone patting your head while rubbing your tummy o Sometimes doing two things at once is easy other times it is hard Why Does it depend on how related the different tasks are to each other Talking on the phone and driving is easier than texting someone about one thing while face to face talking to someone else about another thing