Modules 4 and 5 - Attention and Memory

  Using a sophisticated driving simulator, Beede and Kass (2006) examined the effect of cell phone use on driving performance and found that:Using a sophisticated driving simulator, Beede and Kass (2006) examined the effect of cell phone use on driving performance and found that:

• talking on a cell phone impairs driving performance even if you are using a hands-free device 

• talking on a cell phone impairs driving performance only if you are arguing during the conversation 

• talking on a cell phone impairs driving performance only if you are arguing during the conversation 

• talking on a cell phone doesn’t interfere with driving performance at all 

In the Posner study of spatial attention, participants were shown a central arrow that either was a neutral cue, a high-validity cue (predicting the location of the target 80% of the time), or a low-validity cue (misleading participants to the location of the target 20% of the time) to the location of an upcoming target. Which of the following statements is TRUE?

• Response times to a neutral cue are faster than response times to a valid cue.

• 
  Response times to an invalid cue are faster than response times to a neutral cue.

• There is no difference in response times between either a neutral cue or an invalid cue.

• Response times to a neutral cue are faster than response times to an invalid cue.

In the Shiffrin and Schneider study of Automaticity, participants in the varied mapping condition

• had target letters and distractor letters drawn from the same pool of items

• had target letters and distractor letters drawn from two distinct pools of items

• performed better than participants in the consistent mapping condition

• performed worse than participants in the consistent mapping condition

Which of the following statements is correct? (Choose one.)

• A task that has an inconsistent stimulus-response mapping can only become automatic after a large number of trials.

• Participants in a varied mapping condition were able to attain automatic performance, but only after 300 trials of the task.

• With a varied stimulus-response mapping, response time will continue to increase with the number of distractors regardless of how much practice you have at the task.

• With a consistent stimulus-response mapping, response time will continue to increase with the number of distractors regardless of how much practice you have at the task.

Automaticity has been demonstrated for laboratory tasks, but this concept does not have real-world application.

• True

• False

What is the cocktail party effect?

• Your ability to selectively attend to one conversation even when in a crowded room with lots of conversation.

• When you hear your name spoken on an unattended channel (e.g., even if across the room and spoken by someone you were not paying attention to).

• The difficulty associated with attending to a single conversation when you are in a place with lots of background noise.

• None of these is correct.

Which of the following theories predicts the cocktail party effect? (Choose all that apply).

• Deutsch and Deutsch late filter theory

• Broadbent's early filter theory

• Treisman and Gelade's feature integration theory

• Treisman's attenuator theory

How much meaning is extracted from the visual stimuli in our environment if we are not paying direct attention to that stimuli?

• Quite a lot

• Very little

• None

Work in the area of perception, and in particular vision, shows us that different features of an object are processed in different parts of the brain. How do all the features that belong to a single object end up getting put together?

• via attention

• via synchronizing of alpha brain waves

• via synchronizing of delta brain waves

• via Treisman wave differentials

According to Treisman's Feature Integration Theory, what type of processing happens before you devote attention to a stimulus?

• you will extract separate feature maps of your environment, but you will not yet have put them together and bound them to objects

• a fractured spotlight of attention such that you are distributing your processing over the entire environment, but in a less efficient way than were you directing your attention to a single part of the environment

• no processing happens before you devote attention to a stimulu

• conjunctive processing