Psychology 2135A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Cocktail Party, Parietal Lobe, Frontal Lobe

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2135A/B
• Professor: Graeme Haynes

Document Summary

The capacity to attend to some things while ignoring others. Attention: attend to relevant things while ignoring distracting things. Goal-driven (top-down) control: attention driven by current behavioural goals: e(cid:454)a(cid:373)ple: if (cid:455)ou(cid:396) goal is to lea(cid:396)(cid:374) i(cid:374) (cid:272)lass, (cid:455)ou"ll pa(cid:455) atte(cid:374)tio(cid:374) to the tea(cid:272)he(cid:396), (cid:374)ot fa(cid:272)e(cid:271)ook. Stimulus-drive (bottom-up) control: attention driven by an external stimulus: example: if there is a bang on a door, we will look at the door. Often measure via dichotic listening paradigm: participant receives different message in each ear, participants asked to shadow one message (repeat verbatim) Participants could do one task well, but performance declined when trying to do both at the same time. Error rate was 8x greater when doing both tasks at once. Cocktail party phenomenon: conscious system must be inclined to select info of relevance to the self: we are primed to attend to any information that is relevant to our self.