Cognitive Psychology Exam notes

Why is attention research important?

-negative consequences when attention fails
- Attention predicts progression in education
-Advertising and social media application
- ADHD, anxiety and neglect can be more understood.

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What are the four different types of attention?

1. selective/focused attention- focused on certain info
2. Sustained attention- maintained attention
3. divided attention- attention split between tasks
4. Sensory attention e.g. visual attention

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3 methods of measuring attention:

1. Visual attention- can track eye movements
2. error rates- measures sustained attention to the task
3. self-report - tests attention and awareness e.g. change blindness and also can test mind wandering

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Criticism of tracking eye movements to measure attention

Don't always look at what you pay attention to.

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When could measuring reaction times be useful for attention research?

RT is used to study covert attention. This is based on the assumption that attention moves around and takes time to do so.

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Spatial Cuing

Responses are slower when an invalid cue is shown and therefore shows that spatial attention moved to the cued location

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Visual search tasks

When the target stands out increasing the amount of non-targets has no effect on RT.
If a target is a conjunction RT increases

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Distractor effect tasks

Attention has been distracted by a stimulus if it slows us down and is irrelevant.
Even spatially separate distractors can't be ignored
e.g Stroop task

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Attentional Capture Tasks

Attention captured when a stimulus slows down the reaction time.
E.G colour singleton - if the singleton is not a target it increases RT

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Neural response and Attention

Neural response is boosted when the stimuli is covertly attended.
Fusiform Face Area and Parahippocampal Place Area respond to specific stimulus.

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What is the early versus late selection debate?

Debating where the bottleneck which stops us attending to everything is.
Early selection believes it is only processed to the point of physical characteristics and late selection say you process to the point of meaning.

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The Cocktail Party effect:
- researcher
-task
-type of selection

Cherry
Dichotic listening task
- Headphones play different messages in each ear. PPTS repeat the attended message out loud. They could easily do that but when asked about the other message they could only report characteristics of the voice. Didn't realis

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Filter Theory:
-researcher
-theory
-type of selection

Broadbent
- Filtering occurs before stimuli is analysed at the semantic level.
-All messages enter sensory store but these are then filtered out.
- Early selection

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Moray:
- Selection debate

CRITICISM OF EARLY SELECTION
Subjects could hear their name in the unattended stream.

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Treisman
-selection debate

CRITICISM OF EARLY SELECTION
bilinguals were influenced by unattended stream if it was in their second language

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Treisman's attenuation model

Attempt to improve upon filter theory
- unattended messages are attenuated rather than lost completely. Words have a certain threshold to be detected and each word has a different threshold.
- our name may be more likely to be attenuated

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Late selection

-Both attended and ignored inputs reach semantic analysis
-selection takes place based on analysis of which is most important
-negative priming- responses to previously ignored stimuli is slowed. This suggests stimuli are semantically categorised.

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MacKay
-Late selection

Dichotic Listening Task
- Found that words that were heard in unattended stream could affect the way words were interpreted. E.g Money bank or river bank

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Load theory
-researcher
-theory
-selection type

Lavie
-early and late selection
-Tasks with high perceptual load exhaust the capacity and therefore leads to early selection

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Evidence for Load theory
-3 types

-response competition effects were found under low load but they were eliminated under high load.
-Inattentional blindness- low level task allowed ppt to notice the unexpected stimuli on the last trial.
-Neuroimaging evidence- HPL reduces visual cortex

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Individual differences in Load Theory

-efficiency of selective attention depends on availability of perceptual capacity.
-Video game players remained distracted under high load.

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Biased competition theory
-attention

1. Suggests there are top down attentional control mechanisms and bottom up sensory driver mechanisms (these are sensitive to stimulus salience).
2. They are in competition with each other and whichever wins gets attention.
3. Your goals and motivations

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Stimulus driven attentional selection

- Attention is granted based on stimulus salience, our values and relevancy to us or the stimulus moving.

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Salient Colour Singletons

In a shape based search task where there is a colour singleton top down processing cannot work and therefore colour singletons increase RT.

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Theeuwes

-Suggests there is a pre-attentive stage before selection occurs. This is bottom up processing.
-Attention looks at the visual field as a whole and locates the thing with the most salience. If this isn't what is wanted then it repeats and goes back to st

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Contingent Capture

- says attention capture is not due to stimulus saliency but due to our goals and motivations.
-cuing task research showed that invalid stimulus captures attention and slows down RT but this is contingent on relevancy to the task.

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Bacon and Egeth
Support for Contingent Capture

- in the colour singleton task your task is to find singleton not necessarily shape or colour. Therefore this is top down processing.
- HOWEVER, by adding in shapes they have reduced salience of singleton.

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Abrupt Onsets

- when something suddenly appears
-captures attention
- this could have evolutionary links.

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Display wide settings

- AGAINST STIMULUS DRIVEN CAPTURE.
- lab attention task begins with display wide change
- ppts may look display wide and see what changes and pay attention to that.

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Attentional Capture without physical salience

- meaning e.g threat relevant
-personal relevance
-influence of expertise e.g. musicians being attracted to musical instruments.

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Load Theory and Distraction

- High cognitive load increases distraction (increases interference from colour singleton task)
-Perceptual load reduces distractor processing and increases inattentional blindness.

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Individual differences in Load Theory and Distraction

- People with low WM show higher Stroop interference, more response competition interreference and more own name breakthrough in dichotic listening task.
-individuals with better cognitive control are less likely to be distracted- ADHD and Autism are mor

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Neural Mechanisms of Cognitive Control

- Fmri spatial cueing studies showed frontal parietal activation at the time of cue
-using frontal areas of the brain more made them less likely to be distracted.
-frontal region was involved in sustained attention.

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Anxiety and neural mechanisms of cognitive control

People high in anxiety were less likely to use frontal areas of the brain. Therefore more likely to be distracted.

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Mind Wandering

-internal source of distraction.
-mind wandering is also located in the same brain regions as attentional control.
- High WM capacity decreases mind wandering in attentionally demanding tasks (high perceptual load)

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Challenges of Speech Perception

-no clear gaps between words
-co-articulation words sound different depending on what is said before and after them. This is due to the fact we plan what we are going to say before we say it. Sounds are influenced by next sound.
-Accents gender and speak

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The speech chain

1. Thoughts
2. Motor nerves create movement
3. creates sound
4. received by ear
5. understood

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How speech is produced

- Lungs push air up the trachea (windpipe)
- Vibrates larynx vocal cords
-Sounds from vocal cords are shaped by supralaryngeal vocal tract.

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Consonants

- produced with constriction of vocal tract
-classified by manner, voicing and place of articulation.
- 3 types- stop, nasal and fricative

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Sound Waves Definition

- displacements of air
-periodic
-creates changes in air pressure

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Speech as Sound Waves

- the amplitude of the wave is the loudness of the speech.
- the period of the wave is the frequency of the speech.
- Speech is mixture of different amplitude and periods even in the same sentence.

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Spectogram

-Analyse the frequencies of the speech
-shows how amplitude varies as a function of time and frequency
- ear splits sounds by frequency so shows the info the brain receives

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Source-Filter theory
1960
Fant

-vibration of the vocal cords is the SOURCE. they are useful to convey pitch and intonation
- shaping of the supralarangyeal vocal tract- FILTER. Produces different speech sounds. Produces most important 3 formant frequencies.

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Vowels - Source Filter theory

- Brain uses formant frequencies to determine what vowels are being said.
-When changing from high to low vowels F1 frequency increases.
-Changing from front to back vowel F2 frequency decreases.

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Consonants - Source filter theory

F2 and F3 for determining consonants

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phonemes

perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat.

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How do we perceive phonemes?

-Set up a continuum of sounds between two phonemes. Run an identification experiment. Run a discrimination experiment.
-Categorical perception- perceiving gradual changes in discrete fashion.
- 3 types of categorical perception; abrupt change in identific

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Contextual influences on speech perception

-expectation influences perception
-Visual context- McGurk effect- see one thing and hear a different and then goes together so you hear a third different thing.
-Lexical context- Ganong effect- perception biases towards real words despite the sound not

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Motor Theory of Speech Perception

1. Speech perception is a separate system to what is used for other sounds and is unique to humans. EVIDENCE- speech is perceived categorically unlike other sounds.
2. Speech perception perceives objects that are articulatory EVIDENCE- the sounds are va

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FMRI evidence for the motor theory

Passive listening activates the auditory cortex as well as the motor and premotor areas.

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Evidence against the motor theory

-categorical perception happens for other sounds
-chinchillas can be trained to have the same phoneme boundary as humans

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Brain basis of speech perception

- Superior temporal gyrus for speech perception- Wernicke’s area
- Interior frontal gyrus for speech production- Broca’s area
- Left hemisphere dominant.

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Dorsal Stream
Brain basis of speech perception

- maps speech sounds to articulatory representations.
-used in tasks which focus on the perception of speech sounds.
- Left hemisphere dominant

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Ventral Stream
Brain basis of speech perception

-maps sounds onto word representations.
- Bilateral

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Application of Dorsal and Ventral Stream

Explains why some people can tell apart words but not tell apart sounds.

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Cohort model

- have templates for words
-for each sound heard words that don't apply drop out. "word competition".
-uniqueness point is when the word is recognised.
-method is efficient.

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Evidence of the Cohort Model

- Asked to shadow (guess the word)
-average time to say the word is 250ms average length of word is 375ms therefore they have recognised the word before they have heard them.

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Criticism of the Cohort Model

-cohort model is a type of verbal model
-this means it is difficult to evaluate
-to get a better understanding of the model you could use a computer model.

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TRACE model of speech perception
Computer model

• Within layer inhibitory connections for lexical competition.
• Bi-directional excitatory connection.
• EVIDENCE- eyetracking. If they hear beaker at the beginning they look at objects with b until they start hearing more of the word.
- explain context

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Semantic memory definition
Episodic memory definition

Semantic- factual
Episodic- contextual and relational information (time, location, thoughts, people who were there)

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Amnesia and the brain

-Bilateral hippocampus causes classical amnesia.
-HM
-couldn't encode new memories and struggled with consolidation

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Divided attention and memory

-dividing attention during encoding impairs memory

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The hippocampus

- activated more when people encoded the attended features.
-binds items and context creating memories.
-Attention can modify input to the hippocampus.

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Factors of memory

-picture superiority effect (photos are easier to remember)
- Mentally imageable words and words that refer to objects (concrete words) easier to remember
-could be due to distinctiveness

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Dual code theory

-Paivio
-image plus verbal code makes a richer memory

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University and Memory

Schema related facts activates medial prefrontal cortex. MPC predicts year two performance.

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Levels of processing

-Processing for meaning helps memory encoding
-Ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is activated by semantic processing and activated when words are successfully encoded.

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Distinctiveness and memory

-if someone was judged to have a more distinctive face they activated the hippocampus more.
-this allowed them to be more likely to be recollected.

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Episodic Encoding

-events engage multiple areas of the cortex.
-PFC is involved to organise
-Memories are encoded as by product of event processing.
-Hippocampus binds multi-element memory traces.

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Godden and Baddeley

Free recall of words was better when the context matched
(Underwater or on Land)

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Transfer appropriate processing
Morris 1977

-When the words were cued with asking if they were new or old they remembered semantically encoded words better.
-When cued with rhymes rhyme encoded words were remembered better.

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How do cues work?
3 theories

-content addressable- find by knowing content
-global matching models- retrieval is a function of match of cue with all stored memory traces.
-complementary learning systems model- episodic memory representations stored in cortex. Partial cue triggers pa

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Encoding and Retrieval

Context is incorporated in the memory. Cueing with context helps retrieve memory.
Cue processing should overlap with what was encoded.

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Smith and Manzano

Scene cues had a larger effect when videos were associated with fewer words.

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Self-cueing

Remind yourself of the context to remember the fact

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Episodic reinstatement

-Brain activity at encoding is similar to brain activity when remember memory.
-Reinstatement starts 5 seconds before you recall.
-Machine learning algorithms could discriminate between faces, locations and objects.

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Diary Studies for Memory
Linton

-Memories that have been repeated are easier to remember
-testing increased recall by 42% from basic repetition
-found in education
-generalises to all ages

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Semantic elaboration
How testing effect works

-Testing may enrich semantic representations of a memory.
-Wing
-Fmri study- temporal semantic regions were only activated during testing

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Episodic context
How testing effect works

- tested in different context
-updates context representations to include both
-increases range of potential context cues

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3 types of memory errors

1. Schema and Gist errors- explained by prior knowledge
2. Misattribution errors- explained by limits of memory control
3. Misinformation errors- memory updating post events.

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Deese-Roediger-Mcdermott memory illusion

-False memory of a critical lure being presented.
-Hippocampal damage reduces this false memory which implies it is normal function.
-prefrontal cortex and old age increases these illusions suggesting memory control is involved.

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Why the DRM memory illusion occurs

-Gist activation
-Memory converges as the words are linked.
-Also occurs in pictures

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True and false memories

-can be convincing
-can be based on semantic gist
-Study of abstract shapes showed same brain activation for true and false recognition.
-Right hippocampus and early visual cortex.

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Bartlett's war of ghosts

As people recalled unfamiliar stories they became shorter and more distorted.
This happens when information does not fit our schemas.
NOT WELL CONTROLLED
replication found distortions within 15 minutes.

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Students event memory research

Tested on stuff taught in first week of uni every few weeks and found memories became accurate and stable.
This shows that distortion may be less severe in naturalistic conditions.

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Schema-expectancy and memory

Helped recall however there was more false recognition of high schema objects.

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Memory bias and stereotypes

Stereotypes can alter memories.
These errors increased with delay.

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Eyewitness testimony

About 75% of wrongful convictions in USA involve eyewitness errors.
You can train people to interpret neutral passages positively or negatively and recall details of new story.

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Loftus and Palmer (1974)
Misinformation affect

The results found that vehicle speed estimates were fastest on average for participants given the “smashed” version, and slowest for participants given the “contacted” version, suggesting that an eye witness’ immediate recall of an event could be skewed b

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Memory source monitoring

recollecting context and evaluating what is remembered, this requires.

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Misattribution errors

Vivid recollection but misattribution of the context can occur in unconscious transference.
E.G. mistaking attacker for someone seen on TV around the time.

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Content Borrowing

People misidentify lure objects sharing perceptual details with imagined ones.
Borrowing content from true memories.

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Putnam
In education

Not using laptops as they:
-increase distraction (multitasking learn around 10% less)
-Taking notes on laptops encourages verbatim- shallow processing
LESS CLEAR CUT IN REPLICATION

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Importance of note-taking

-promotes deep encoding of the material
-provides external storage of lecture content
-Support later study

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Schemas in education

-Associative memory for the inferred paring was better if it matched schemas

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Schemas at university

-connecting material to what was learned before helps new learning and generalisation
-revising ideas

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memory cues and studying

-elaboration while studying can add to cues to retrieve something
-you can generate your own cues when your studying
-mnemonic
-Helped higher-order thinking on MCQ

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Self-generated cues and studying

-make connection
-more likely to overlap with own cognitive context
-based on transfer-appropriate processing principle

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Evidence based revision at university

-least useful; summarisation, imagery for text and re-reading
-most useful; testing yourself

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spaced repetition

-revisiting after a break helps memory (spaced learning)

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Academic Learning
Conway

-testing after lecture and more delayed
-immediately after lectures they knew facts in lecture, delayed they knew facts not lecture
-shift from episodic to semantic memory

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Cognitive Psychology Exam notes

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