PSYB57H3 Chapter 4: chapter 4- paying attention
Document Summary
Selective attention: we focus on one or a few tasks rather than many; we shut out competing tasks. We process information differently depending on whether or not we have been actively focusing on a stimulus: dichotic listening task- a person listens to audiotapes over headphones; there are. 2 different recordings on each tape while they are played together. Participants are asked to repeat aloud one of the messages being played. At the end of the task the participants are asked what they remember from either message. The person must concentrate on the message to be shadowed, which requires a lot of mental resources. Thus, fewer mental resources are available to process information from the non-shadowed, unattended message: participants could not recall the content of the unattended message or the language in which it was spoken. Even when the language was changed the participants could not notice the change in the unattended message.
