Chapter 3

You are reading your textbook, and your eyes are moving over the page, but later you realize that you can't remember anything about the information on the page. In this phenomenon,

you are actually daydreaming

Which of the following visual activities would be most likely to employ the orienting attention network?

you are searching for an empty seat in a crowded classroom

Nisbett and Wilson examined people's consciousness about their higher mental processes. According to their research

we are often unable to introspect accurately about our thought processes

Research on dichotic listening shows that

when people pay attention to one task, they typically notice little about other tasks.

Research by Anne Treisman has demonstrated that

when people use focused attention, they typically perceive a figure whose shape is linked with its appropriate color.

The phrase "ironic effects of mental control" means that

when we try to avoid a particular thought, it may be even more likely to enter consciousness

Which of the following students provides the most accurate summary about phone use when someone is driving? a. Henri: "As long as someone other than the driver is talking on the phone, there's no problem." b. Edith: "As long as a driver uses a hands-free phone, there's no problem." c. Charles: "When drivers are talking on the phone, they pay less attention to objects that appear in the middle of their visual field." d. Jeanne: "When drivers are talking on the phone, the passengers can carry on a continuous conversation without affecting the driver."

Charles: "When drivers are talking on the phone, they pay less attention to objects that appear in the middle of their visual field."

Which of the following would be least interested in the topic of attention?

Early behaviorists

your verbal reports about your cognitive processes are most likely to be accurate for which of the following tasks?

Guessing which items from the list of psychology terms you would be most likely to define correctly on an examination

What is the current status of the bottleneck theory of attention?

It is not flexible enough to explain human attention

Which of the following students provides the most complete, accurate information about the topic called "mind wandering"? a. Daphne: "When your mind wanders, your visual acuity actually improves." b. Dan: "When your mind wanders, you no longer can match an object's shape with its color." c. Evan: "Mind wandering occurs when your attention shifts from distributed attention to focused attention." d. Karolina: "Mind wandering occurs when your thoughts shift from the outside world to your inner thoughts."

Karolina: "Mind wandering occurs when your thoughts shift from the outside world to your inner thoughts.:

Which of the following students provides the best summary of the research about using a cell phone and paying attention while driving? a. Hans: "As long as you talk on a hands-free cell phone, you can still pay full attention to driving." b. Gail: "As long as you are an experienced driver, talking on a hand-held cell phone or a hands-free cell phone will not distract your attention." c. María Luisa: "Talking on a hands-free cell phone can distract your attention." d. Josh: "Fortunately, drivers are not distracted when a passenger is having a conversation on a phone."

María Luisa: "Talking on a hands-free cell phone can distract your attention."

Which of the following is considered to be the best current explanation of the visual condition called "blindsight"?

Some information from the retina travels to regions of the cortex outside the visual cortex

Suppose that you are sitting in a classroom, trying to follow your professor's lecture while trying to ignore a loud conversation out in the hallway. This situation most closely resembles

a dichotic listening task

Psychologists have conducted studies in which the participants must detect a stimulus in a display of many other objects. According to this research, people usually detect

a feature that is present more quickly than a feature that is absent

In the chaotic aftermath of a robbery, you see a tall thin man in a red shirt and a shorter man in a black jacket running from the scene of the crime. According to research on illusory conjunctions, it would not be surprising for you to later remember seeing

a tall, thin man in a black jacket

Suppose that you are running to catch a subway. You race past a large poster that shows various foods in uncharacteristic colors, such as an orange strawberry and a red carrot. However, you actually perceive a red strawberry and an orange carrot. In Anne Treisman's theory, this phenomenon would be called

an illusory conjunction

Chapter 3 discussed a study in which people in a laboratory setting were instructed to pay close attention to one message and to ignore a second message that mentioned their own name. According to your textbook,

about 1/3 of the time, people noticed their name in the irrelevant message

Shawn claims that he multitasks very effectively, and also says that he actually performs better while multitasking than when doing a single task. You ask Shawn to test this claim. Shawn reads a newspaper article while listening to a baseball game, and then reads another article in silence. Based on research on multitasking, when you time Shawn's reading speed and test his comprehension, you are likely to find that his reading is

both slower and less accurate when listening to the game

Your awareness about both the surrounding world and your cognitive processes is called

consciousness

Suppose that you are sitting in a cafeteria, trying to focus on a comment from a student on your left, while a student on your right is talking to a friend. THis resembles the lab setup known as

dichotic listening

According to Anne Treisman's feature-integration theory

distributed attention uses parallel search through the visual field

Imagine that you are listening to a friend complain about an assignment, but you are simultaneously trying to read the newspaper. This is an example of

divided attention

Multitasking is a form of

divided attention

The letters Q and O differ only in the presence or absence of a single feature. Based on research on visual search, you would find ti

easier to detect a Q in an array of Os than to detect an O in an array of Qs

Imagine that you need to meet someone at the airport. You would notice him more quickly if he had told you "Look for the only person wearing a hat" than if he told you, "Look for the only person not wearing a hat." This situation is most similar to

feature present/feature absent effect

Suppose that Silvia has had a stroke that damaged part of the left hemisphere of her brain, and a neurologist says that she has 'unilateral spatial neglect' You would expect that she

ignores objects that appear in her right visual field

Clinical psychologists have conducted research on the Stroop effect. This research shows that

individuals who have a phobia have trouble reporting the color of words related to their phobia

What is the function of saccadic eye movement?

it focuses the area of greatest visual accuity over the material to be seen

The bottleneck theory is inadequate in accounting for attention because

it underestimates the flexibility of our attention

Suppose that researchers show you one blue X surrounded by 25 red Xs. According to the discussion of visual search, you would locate that blue X

just as quickly as if there were only three other red Xs ....

Compared to a good reader, a poor reader is likely to

make more regressions to earlier material

Chinese readers make saccadic eye movements when they are reading a book written in chinese script. Compared to English readers, the chinese readers

move their eyes only two-three characters in a saccade, because each chinese character contains more info

You need saccadic eye movements when you are reading this sentence in order to

move your eye so that the next words are registered in the fovea

Suppose that you are searching a list of college I.D. numbers to determine what grade you received in an exam. The system in your brain that is most involved in this search is the

orienting attention network

An illusory conjunction occurs when

people are not able to use focused attention

The Stroop effect is related to selective attention because

people are required to pay selective attention to the color of the stimulus, rather than the name of the stimulus

On a dichotic listening task

people notice little about the message they are supposed to ignore

According to the research on saccadic eye movements

poor readers tend to make more regression movements than good readers do

The neuroscience research on the executive attention network shows that this system

primarily activates the prefrontal part of the cortex

Imagine that your friend Pete has an intense fear of spiders. If he tries the emotional Stroop test, he would be most likely to

report the ink color more slowly if the words were related to spiders

A man is being tested in a cognitive psychology lab. If he has blindsight, he will

say he cannot see an object, even though he often points in te correct direction

Suppose that Susan is taking the Stroop test, and the first item shows the word "red," printed in blue ink. According to your textbook, one reason that she will have trouble reporting the ink color (blue) for this item is that

she has had more experience in reading words than in identifying ink colors

Suppose that a friend at your college says that she can multitask very effectively, even when two tasks are challenging. Based on the information in Chapter 3, you would conclude that

she may believe that she can multitask effectively, but research does not support this belief

Suppose that Jessica has a phobic disorder, a fear of snakes. A clinical psychologist gives her the appropriate version of an emotional Stroop task. Jessica would be likely to:

show an attentional bias, so that she pays less attention to the color of the ink, when the word is related to snakes.

Suppose that some students are participating in a dichotic listening task. Which of the following kinds of students would be most likely to notice their names in the irrelevant message?

students with low working-memory capacity

In making a saccadic eye movement in reading a sentence in English, you are most likely to move to

the middle of a long word

Suppose that you are searching for a set of square-shaped, red earrings on a jewelry counter that has four kinds of earrings: square blue, square red, round blue, and round red. If Treisman's research on attention applies to this task,

the number of other square earrings and the number of other red earrings would influence the time taken to find the square red earrings

Imagine that you are searching your room for a specific textbook. Which portion of the cortex would be most active during this search?

the parietal lobe

Right now, you are moving your eyes as you read this question. The letter that you can see at any given moment - in between eye movements - would be called

the perceptual span

Saccadic movements are

the very rapid eye movements from one location to another

Imagine that you have been on a strict diet for several weeks. No matter how hard you try, you can't avoid thinking about chocolate chip cookies and lemon meringue pie. You are having difficulty with

thought suppression

According to your textbook's introduction to chapter 3, attention

uses both top-down and bottom-up processing

Suppose that you are looking for a dark-colored car in a row of parked cars. Among them, 11 are light colored and one is dark colored. The dark-colored car seems to pop out. In this example,

you are using bottom up processing?

Suppose that you are looking at a jewelry counter containing dozens of red ruby pendants and one green emerald pendant. According to Anne Treisman's theory, if the emerald seems to jump out at you perceptually

you automatically processed some features, such as the color of the jewels, during distributed attention

According to your textbook, consciousness refers to

your awareness of the outside world and of your perceptions, images, and feelings

When you try the Stroop task, you need to say the name of the colors and inhibit your automatic tendency to read the words. This kind of search typically activates

your executive attention network