Cognitive Psychology Chapter 4

change blindness

A person who fails to detect changes that occur for attended or unattended objects in a viewed scene is demonstrating ____.

blindsight

A person with lesions in the visual cortex may report not being able to see information; however, if forced to answer about an item, the person can often correctly guess the location and orientation of various objects. This suggests that some processing of visual information occurs outside of conscious awareness, a process called ____.

feature-intergration

According to ____ theory, the key factor affecting the relative ease or difficulty of visual searches is whether or not we must combine various characteristics of objects to successfully complete our search.

feature-integration theory

According to ____, all searches, whether conjunctive or feature, involve two stages. The first stage involves the analysis of features and the second involves combining features into objects.

hit

According to signal-detection theory, a ____ occurs when we correctly identify the presence of a signal.

correct rejection

According to signal-detection theory, a ____ occurs when we correctly report that a signal is absent.

miss

According to signal-detection theory, a ____ occurs when we incorrectly report that a signal is absent, when it is, in fact, present.

false alarm

According to signal-detection theory, a ____ occurs when we incorrectly report that a signal is present when it is, in fact, absent.

filter and bottleneck

According to the ____ theories of attention, information is selectively blocked out or attenuated as it passes from one level of processing to the next.

attentional-resource

According to the ____ theories of attention, people have a fixed amount of attentional capacity that they allocate to the perceived task requirements.

similarity

According to the ____ theory, the difficulty of eliminating distractors depends on the characteristics they do or do not share.

vigilance

Alice is a lifeguard at a busy beach. When on duty, she must remain alert to detect someone having difficulties in the water or other potentially dangerous situations, despite prolonged periods during which no danger is present. Alice's job requires great ____.

a feature search

As a child, every time you went to a place with large crowds, your mother had you wear a bright colored shirt. She knew that it would be easier to spot you in the crowd by the color of your shirt. She was making use of ____.

state-based and trait-based

Both _____ anxiety influence attentional processes.

feature

Fred needs to spot a particular friend in a crowded auditorium. Fred's friend has very bright red hair, so Fred scans the hall for very bright red hair. Fred is using a ____ search.

capture errors

In ____ we intend to deviate from a routine activity we are implementing in familiar surroundings, but at a point at which we should depart from the routine, we fail to pay attention and to regain control of the process.

conjunction

In a ____ search, we must search for a combination of stimulus characteristics.

Feature search

In a ____ we look for just one characteristic (e.g., color, shape, or size) that makes our search object different from all others.

change blindness

In the making of a movie, any particular scene is often filmed several times. No matter how hard they try during the editing process, there is often some discontinuity in the scenes (e.g., an object suddenly changes location from one location to another). Failure to notice these changes would be an example of ____.

preconscious

Information about your bedroom, such as the number of windows in it, is often easily pulled from ____ awareness to conscious awareness.

preconscious

Information that is available for cognitive processing but that currently lies outside of conscious awareness exists at the ____ level of awareness.

younger participants are more accurate and faster than older participants

Madden's (2007) research examining the impact of aging on visual search ability has found that ____.

omission

Marla is carefully transplanting tomato seedlings as she has often done when a neighbor stops by to chat. After Marla has resumed her task, she stops suddenly, realizing she has failed to put fertilizer in the bottom of the hole before she puts in the seedling. Marla has made a(n) ____.

slips

Mistakes are to controlled processes as ______ are to automatic processes.

listening to the news and writing a paper both require verbal processing

Most people can listen to music and write a paper simultaneously, but it is harder to listen to the news station and concentrate on writing at the same time. This is because ____.

norepinephrine

Research indicates that the neurotransmitter ____ is involved in alerting.

reduced effects

Research suggests that children of mothers with lower levels of education show ____ of selective attention on neural processing.

divided attention

Splitting your attentional resources between two or more different task is called ____.

signal

Suppose you are a radiologist reading mammograms. Your job is to determine whether there are any suspicious, possibly malignant images. In this type of task, the stimulus that you are attempting to detect may be called a ____.

amygdala

The ____ appears to be important in the regulation of vigilance.

cocktail party

The ____ phenomenon refers to the process of tracking one conversation in the face of the distraction of other conversations.

Stroop effect

The ____ refers to the psychological difficulty in selective attention that occurs when a literate person attempts to name the colors of ink used to print the color words for other colors (e.g., "blue" may be printed in red ink).

negatively accelerated

The effects of practice on automatization show a ____ curve, in which early practice effects are great and later practice makes less and less difference in the degree of automatization.

capture error

Thomas is supposed to stop for milk, bread and cheese on his way from home from work. This requires that he get off train two stops early to pick up the items. Unfortunately, he does not remember to get off early and must backtrack to get to the store. Thomas has made a(n) ____.

search

Trying to locate a particular friend in a crowded auditorium or a particular key term in a large list of terms are examples of ____.

preattentive and attentive processes

Ulric Neisser synthesized the early filter and the late filter models in part by proposing that there are two processes governing attention: ____.

description error

Verlys just picked up mail at her post office box and is standing at a table sorting it. Catalogs and junk mail get thrown away while important mail is placed in her bag. Unfortunately, she drops several important pieces of mail into the trash. This is best described as a(n) ____.

spatial neglect

What attentional dysfunction, typically due to lesions in the parietal lobes, occurs when a person ignores information from half of their visual field?

Multitasking makes you slower and more prone to make mistakes.

What does research on attention state about multitasking?

His results depended on whether or not the prime was viewed long enough to become conscious.

What was the pattern of results that Marcel (1983) found using primes that have two different meanings (e.g., palm: hand or tree)?

omission

When our routines are interrupted, we may accidentally skip steps despite the fact that our routines are well learned. This describes a(n) _____.

We have a fixed amount of attention that we can use on multiple tasks.

Which best describes the capacity model of attention?

Participants are asked to watch a film showing two activities superimposed on one another.

Which best describes the dual-task paradigm used to study divided attention in the laboratory?

signal detection

Which function of attention involves the ability to correctly state whether or not a particular stimulus has been presented?

Treisman's attenuation model

Which model of selective attention suggests that instead of blocking out stimuli, the filter merely weakens the strength of all stimuli other than the target stimulus?

Moray's selective filter model

Which model of selective attention suggests that messages that are of high importance to a person may break through the filter of selective attention?

Deutsch and Deutsch's late filter model

Which model of selective attention suggests that the filter for blocking signals occurs after sensory processing and allows for both perceptual and conceptual analysis of information to take place?

Broadbent's model

Which model of selective attention suggests that, while there are multiple channels for sensory input, only one channel is processed while the other channels of information are filtered out before sensory processing?

consciousness

Which of the following is NOT a primary function of attention?

Those with it have difficulty focusing their attention.

Which statement about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is true?

signal-detection theory

Which theory characterizes our ability to correctly state whether or not a particular stimulus has been presented?

divided attention

You are watching your favorite TV show when a friend enters the room and wants to engage you in conversation. You really want to watch your show, but know that you should attend to the conversation. You try to do both. This is an example of ____.

a conjunction search; a feature search

Your child attends a school that requires all children to wear particular uniforms, although the shirts can be white or light blue and the pants and skirts can be khaki or dark blue. Although it can be difficult to spot your child, when it is raining, it is easy for you to spot the red umbrella that your child uses in the sea of dark umbrellas. The search has changed from ____ to _____.

a conjunction

Your child attends a school that requires all children to wear particular uniforms, although the shirts can be white or light blue and the pants and skirts can be khaki or dark blue. When you search for your child in a sea of children whose faces you cannot see, you must search for a child wearing the same color shirt and pants as your child wore, with the same color hair of your child and the same height and build of your child. In other words, you must use a ____ search.

loss of activation

Your roommate has made it abundantly clear to you that you are to pick up a particular bottle of wine on your way back from class and you dutifully stop at the wine store, only to discover you cannot remember the name of the wine. You are experiencing a(n) ____ error.

associative activation

Your usual walk home has been changed because of construction. Instead of turning right when you pass the park, you must now turn left right before the park. Unfortunately, you typically do not remember this until you are midway through the park. You are making a(n) ____ error.

data driven

Your younger sibling has a nasty habit of trying to annoy you when you are calling a phone number that is not already in your phone by shouting out random numbers as you enter the correct digits. Your sibling is hoping you will make a(n) ____ error.

Consciousness

____ includes both the feeling of awareness and the content of awareness.

Orienting

____ involves being able to select which stimuli to attend to.

Attention

____ is the means by which we actively select and process a limited amount of information from all of the information captured by our senses, our stored memories, and our other cognitive processes.

Neisser's

____ model combines early-filter and later-filter models by suggesting that there are two processes, preattentive and attentive, that govern attention.

Dichotic

____ presentation refers to the simultaneous presentation of different auditory stimuli (such as verbal messages) to each ear.

Automatic

____ processing refers to cognitive manipulation that requires no conscious decisions or intentional effort.

Controlled

____ processing refers to cognitive processing that requires conscious control and effort that is performed one step at a time.

Distracters

____ refer to nontarget stimuli that divert our attention away from the target stimulus.

Arousal

____ refers to a degree of physiological excitation, responsivity, and readiness for action relative to a baseline.

Vigilance

____ refers to a person's ability to attend to a field of stimulation over a prolonged period, during which the person seeks to detect the appearance of a particular target stimulus of interest.

Divided attention

____ refers to a situation in which we must prudently allocate cognitive resources so we can complete two or more tasks simultaneously.

Perseverations

____ refers to accidentally repeating steps of an automatic procedure after the procedure has been completed.

tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon

____ refers to an experience involving the preconscious level of consciousness, in which a person tries to remember something that is known to be stored in memory, but that the person cannot quite retrieve.

Shadowing

____ refers to an experimental task in which you listen to two different messages and then are required to repeat back only one of the messages as soon as possible after you hear it, while ignoring the other.

Selective attention

____ refers to our ability to attend to some stimuli while ignoring or minimally processing other stimuli.

Search

____ refers to situations in which we actively seek out particular stimuli.

Automatization

____ refers to the process by which a person repeats a procedure so frequently that the procedure changes from being highly conscious and effortful to being relatively automatic and effortless.

Priming

____ refers to the process by which particular stimuli activate mental pathways that enhance the ability to process subsequent stimuli related to the initial stimuli in some way.

Alerting

_____ involves being prepared to focus on incoming information.