PSYB57H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Hemispatial Neglect, Automaticity, Prefrontal Cortex
Document Summary
Participants wear headphones and hear a different stimulus in each ear: stimulus they are instructed to pay attention to = attended channel, stimulus they are instructed to ignore = unattended channel. The participants had no idea about what was said in the unattended stimulus. Physical attributes of an unattended channel are heard even though participants seem oblivious to the unattended channel"s semantic content. Words with some personal performance are often noticed, even though the rest of the unattended channel is perceived only as an undifferentiated blur. Cocktail party effect = attended to only 1 conversation in a room with multiple conversations which you tune out. You somehow block processing of the inputs you"re not interested in. This proposal was central for early theories of attention, bottleneck theories , which suggested that you erect a filter that shields you from potential distractors. More recent evidence suggests that this filtering is rather specific and is done on a distractor-by-distractor basis.
