State the two capabilities of attention that cognitive psychologists study.
List some questions that could be asked about these two capabilities.
Describe the procedure for a dichotic listening task and state what capability of attention it can be used to study.
Explain what "shadowing" means in a dichotic listening task and what the purpose of it is.
State what characterisics of an unattended message a person does and does not process, according to the earliest findings about selective attention that were uncovered using the dichotic listening task.
List examples that illustrate the processed characteristics of the unattended message you named above.
List examples that illustrate the unprocessed characteristic.
Explain the "cocktail party effect" in terms of a real cocktail party and in terms of what people do notice in an unattended message.
Describe the findings in an experiment on inattentional blindness in which participants looked at a fixation target but attended to "+" shapes off to the side. (Either the horizontal or the vertical bar of the "+" was longer, and their task was to report which) Explain what the findings show.
Describe the findings in an experiment on conscious versus unconscious perception in which participants were to report which of two horizontal lines was longer while ignoring a pattern of dots around the lines. (Sometimes the pattern of dots formed the "fins" of the Muller-Lyer illusion, i.e., >---< <---> ) Explain what the findings show.
Describe the findings in an experiment on inattentional blindness versus inattentional amnesia in which participants saw letters superimposed on pictures. (They were instructed to either attend to the letters or the pictures) Explain what the findings show.
Explain what could be the "work" involved in selective attention.
Describe Posner and Snyder's (1975) experiment. Design Results
State two types of detector-priming that are involved in selective attention.
Distinguish between the characteristics of the two types of priming.
State the three mechanisms of attention that perform different jobs and are performed by different regions in the brain.
Define unilateral neglect. Describe how it is related to both spatial attention and to object attention.
State whether attention is better viewed as a single faculty of the mind, or as multiple mechanisms.
Distinguish between the concepts of a limited resource for attention that is task-general versus task-specific.
Explain what we would expect to see happening with performance in a divided attention task if the attentional resources were task-general versus if they were task-specific.
Describe some of the evidence for task-general and for task-specific attentional resources.
Explain how the existence of task-specific resources could account for the results of dichotic listening experiments.
Describe the evidence for a task-general response-selector.
Distinguish between automaticity and reflex.
Describe the Spelke, Hirst, and Neisser experiments on divided attention. Explain what the findings suggest.
