PSYC20007 Lecture Notes - Spring 2017 Lecture 8 - Eriksen flanker task, Automaticity, Attentional blink

• School: University of Melbourne
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC20007
• Professor: Meredith McKague

Document Summary

Psychological function of spatial attention, to assign limited-capacity processing resources to relevant stimuli in the natural environment, must locate stimuli among distractors and process (identify) them, visual search laboratory analogue of cheetahs-in-the-savannah. Mean reaction time does not increase with display size evidence that we compare contents of each display location with mental representation of target at the same time (parallel search: conjunction targets do not pop out. Target is defined by a combination of colour and orientation. Target does not pop out -> actively moving attention around the stimuli. > slope is twice as steep for target absent vs. target present trials. Evidence for serial search: serial search in turn. Seems to need to focus attention on target to detect it focus attention on each item. When target is found, scanning stops (self-terminating search target-present trials) On average, half of the display is scanned on target-present trials and all of the display.