PSYC 2650 Lecture 6: Attention

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2650
• Professor: Chris Fiacconi

Document Summary

Varieties of attention: selective attention, attention as a resource, control vs. automaticity. The ability to focus on a subset of perceptual information that reaches the senses. When participants are told which ear to attend, they can effectively filter out the other non-relevant message. Task is easier if physical characteristics of the two voices differ. Both channels are processed at the level of meaning, after meaning of process that is when you become aware late selection model. Cocktail party effect: despite blocking out background chatter during conversation, many of us will notice if our name is spoken in a different conversation. Suggests that some information from an unattended channel gets processed at the semantic level. Treisman"s (1960) shadowing study: shadowed message suddenly shifted to unattended channel. Instead of continuing to repeat attended channel, participants started to repeat the unattended channel to maintain the meaning of the sentence must be some form of semantic analysis in unattended channel.