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Questions and Answers
What is the name of the theory discussed in the section that differentiates processing object features from object perception?
Feature Integration Theory
How many processing stages are suggested by the Feature Integration Theory?
Feature Integration Theory predicts that if a person cannot focus attention on objects, they will correctly bind different features into one complete percept.
False
________ saw displays with two numbers and four shapes for a short period in Treisman and Schmidt's experiment.
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Match the researchers with their study on attention:
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What is the percentage of participants who noticed the pedestrian/animal in the low perceptual load condition?
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What is the percentage of participants who noticed the pedestrian/animal in the high perceptual load condition?
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How many unexpected events occurred out of 108 trials in Evidence 3?
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What is the focus of divided attention studies?
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Older adults perform better than young adults in dual-task processing.
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Study Notes
Attention and Object Perception
- Visual attention plays a crucial role in object perception, acting like a spotlight that focuses on objects
- Feature Integration Theory (Treisman & Gelade, 1980) differentiates processing object features (e.g., color, shape) from object perception
- Stage 1: Pre-attentive stage - individual features of all visible objects are processed in parallel and not yet associated
- Stage 2: Focussed Attention Stage - attend to objects with features matching the one being searched for, binding the features into one integrated percept
Evidence for Feature Integration Theory
- Treisman and Schmidt's (1982) experiment: participants saw displays with two numbers and four shapes for 1/5 of a second
- Results: illusory conjunctions (e.g., yellow triangle) on nearly 20% of trials
- Research on Patient R.M. (Robertson et al., 1997): unable to focus visual attention, resulting in illusory conjunctions
Focussed Attention and Distractions
- Distractions can impact task performance: McEvoy et al. (2006) found 6% of drivers attributed crashes to external distractions
- Lavie's Perceptual Load Theory (1995, 2010) explains how likely we are to be impacted by distractions during focussed attention tasks
- Low perceptual load tasks: distractions may be processed, potentially impairing primary task performance
- High perceptual load tasks: few or no attentional resources left over to process distractions
Inattentional Blindness
- Failure to notice unexpected salient objects or events when viewing a scene due to divided attention
- Simons and Chabris's (1999) gorilla study: 42% of participants did not notice the gorilla
- Inattentional blindness can occur in real-world situations, such as radiologists examining lung X-rays (Drew et al., 2013)
Factors Influencing Inattentional Blindness
- Unexpected object/task similarity
- Perceptual Load: Lavie suggested inattentional blindness is most likely to occur during high perceptual load tasks
- Evidence: Cartwright-Finch and Lavie (2007), Murphy and Greene (2016, 2017)
Divided Attention
- Studied via the dual-task paradigm, comparing performance in focussed attention and divided attention conditions
- Modality of stimuli and response modality can impact divided attention performance (Treisman & Davies, 1973; McLeod, 1977)
- Practice improves divided attention/dual-task performance (Spelke et al., 1976)
- Aging affects divided attention, with older adults showing slower processing speeds but similar accuracy (Verhaeghen et al., 2001)
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