SELECTIVE ATTENTION

SELECTIVE ATTENTION: ITS RELATIONSHIP TO PERCEPTUAL

PROCESSING OF INFORMATION IN PRESPEECH MEMORY BUFFER

Does Selective Attention (mechanism that further processes information in a prespeech memory buffer) inhibit the processing of unattended information or is there a cognitive mechanism that automatically processes input even if humans are not attending to it? The research attempts to answer this question through an exploration of the effects of auditory color-word interference on a visual Stroop interference task with a spoken response.

The context within which the conducted research can best be understood begins with some early work in the field conducted by Broadbent (1958). In this early work where subjects monitored (selectively attended to) input, Broadbent found that (1) Semantic/conceptual features of stimuli were harder to attend to than were the physical features of the stimuli, and (2) only the physical features could be recalled for unattended stimuli. As a result it was postulated that Selective Attention operates to filter out or inhibit the processing of semantic information when this information is coming through a channel that is not being monitored. This finding l@d to the notion that unattended input does not receive perceptual analysis; the notion was based on a model which stated that the prespeech buffer was limited to one item at a time. Therefore, if an item arrived when the buffer was occupied, the item would be lost. It is impor

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les: (1) the Visual variable with two levels, control task (string of xs) and the Stroop task (color words); and (2) Auditory variable with two levels, the silence condition and the spoken color-word condition. The design is a Within design ) which is to say that all subjects saw all levels of the two independent variables. There were two dependent measures in the study. These were (1) the mean response time over trials for each subject (a total of five trials per subject) and (2) the mean number of errors over trials for each subject. Procedures Each subject sat facing one wall of the sound-attenuated chamber with the experimenter to his back. The subject was instructed to name as rapidly as possible a sequence of colors presented either in the form of color words or as a string of xs; subjects were told that it was the color of ink used which they were expected to identify. In the silence conditions, subjects merely performed these two tasks in their order of presentation. (Order was counterbalanced to control for any possible carryover effects). In the auditory conditions, subjects were required to perform the same two tasks but, while doing so they were also required to listen to color words being spoken to them over

Category: Psychology - S