Attentional Resources
20 important questions on Attentional Resources
Attention has a limited capacity for conscious processing of information, what is this capacity required for? (5 points)
2. Reasoning and decision making
3. Planning
4. Response selection i.e. if something is moving fast towards you, you will move away
5. Response inhibition i.e. if something is moving fast towards you and you’re a footballer, you need to inhibit the the desire to run away as you need to catch the rugby ball
What is the Single Resource Theory?
- used flexibly across tasks
- if demands of tasks exceed capacity, performance is reduced e.g. thinking while driving – either you thinking component declines or your driving component declines.
- Kahneman (1973) found that motivation and arousal increase cognitive performance i.e. attentional processing is related to your level of arousal e.g. if you just got out of bed, you’re not at a high level of arousal you have limited attentional resource
This resource is only needed when we consciously control behaviour
What is the Central Capacity Theory?
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What is a benefit of the Single Resource Theory?
What are 3 limitations of the Single Resource Theory?
- Experimental evidence is consistent with multiple resource theories
- Tasks in the same modularity are more disruptive than tasks in different modularities e.g. visual or auditory. Tasks in the same modularity compete for the same resources
What are the limitations with Multiple Resources Theories?
- ignores coordination problems for dual tasks
- some disruption for dual tasks in different modulities
What did Baddeley do (1986)
He proposed that their are separate pools of resources:
- the phonological loop (verbal information)
- episode buffer
- visuospatial sketchpad
= all these pools rely on the central executive unit
The focus on this model is on processing, not responses or modulaities
i.e. the model is a good example of managing different processing commands
Why is it difficult to rub you tummy and pat your head?
Performance is worse when tasks are similar
Why is studying dual tasks important?
- limits of attentional resource/capacity
What are 3 factors that affect dual task performance?
2. Practice
3. Difficulty - harder tasks require more information processing (attention) and coordination
Performance is determined more by task similarity than by task difficulty.
What experiment shows that practice increases performance?
They taught students to read stories and take dictation
- initially they had poor handwriting and reading speed
- after 6 weeks of training, reading speed was normal and handwriting improved
= shows that practicing a dual task reduces the load on your attentional resources
Why does practice reduce interference between 2 tasks?
- effectively interweave the different tasks
- this doesn't change the difficulty of the two tasks, you are just better at coordinating the two tasks
2. practice reduces the amount of cognitive resources the tasks need
- i.e they become easier so less attention is needed
3. practice helps to differentiate the two tasks
- i.e. they become more different
4. practice reduces the number of different cognitive processes required
What is meant by Automatic Processing?
Automaticity
- fast
- do not disrupt other tasks (i.e. require no attention as you know how to do it automatically)
- unconscious
- reflexive
Stroopeffect e.g. you have to read out the colour of a word, not what the word says = the automatic response needs to be inhibited in order to produce the desired response – our automatic response would be to read what the word says
Limitation with automatic processing = its inflexibility when conditions change (e.g. bad driving habits)
What did Shiffrin & Schneider (1977) investigate?
Controlled responses
- require engagement of limited attentional resources
- are conscious
- can be used flexibly in changing circumstances
Automatic responses
- has no capacity limit i.e. you can process huge amounts of info if the process is fairly automatic e.g. being good at maths
- do not require attention
- hard to modify when learned
What 3 things did Norman & Shallice (1986) propose?
2. Choices
- chooses between simultaneously active schema
- biased by goals and desires but does not require attention
3. Deliberate control by Supervisory Attention System (SAS)
- system for overriding automatically generated behaviours
- generated novel responses i.e. doing anything for the first time e.g. learning to ski
SAS is basically the same as the singular resource and the central executive system
What is evidence supports Norman & Shallice (1986)?
Examines 35 people, on average there was 1 action slip a day e.g. they put something in the wrong place, go the wrong way in a familiar environment etc
- this typically occurs when attention is elsewhere
E.g. when your central executive system is operated by other things = this triggers your schema which in most cases is fine, but in some cases actions lead to silly mistakes
What are 2 benefits of Norman & Shallice's model?
- very influential
What are 2 limitations of Normal & Shallice's model?
- practice could speed processing, or it could change processing
What is the Instance Theory and who was it proposed by?
- Each encounter with a stimulus produces a separate memory trace. Repeated encounters (practice) produces a greater store of information about the stimulus and how to process it
- This increase in knowledge means retrieval of relevant information about the stimulus is fast
- Automaticity occurs when the stimulus directly triggers the retrieval of a past solution from memory
- In other cases the solution must be arrived using conscious strategies or heuristics.
i.e. The more practice you have means the more you can bypass processing stages = do the action automatically
Why is the Logan's, Instance Theory more useful than other theories?
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