Selective Attention

The stroop effect

● Named after James Stroop, who created it.
● According to this test, people take a long time to name the ink color used in printing an
incongruent word; in contrast, they can quickly name the same ink color when it appears
as a solid patch of color.
● People may require 100 seconds to recall the ink color of 10 words that are incongruent
color names. In contrast, they require only 60 seconds to name the ink colors for 100
colored patches.
● Iut activates 2 pathways at the same time.
● One is activated by the task of naming the color of the ink, the other is activated by the
task of reading the word. Interference occurs when 2 competing pathways
● Another explanation for the task is that adults have had much more practice in reading
words than in naming colors.
● The more automatic process interferes with the less automatic process.
● On the emotional stroop task, people are instructed to name the ink color of words that
could have strong emotional significance to them.
● These individuals often require more time to name the color of the stimuli, presumably
because they have trouble ignoring their emotional reactions to the words themselves.
● People who have phobic disorders are hyper alert to words related to their phobia and
they show an attentional bias to the meaning of these stimuli.
● This bias describes a situation in which people pay extra attention to some stimuli or
some feature.
● In addition, adults who showed an attentional bias towards suicide realted words are
more likely than other adults to make a suicide attempt within the following 6 months.
● Other research shows people who are depressed take a long time to re
● pot the color of words related to sadness and despair.

Visual Search
● The observer must find a target in a visual display that has numerous distractors. In
some cases, our lives may depend on accurate visual searches.
● Jeremy Wolfe and his colleagues (2005) found that people are much more accurate in
ID a target if it appears frequently.
● If the target appears (in a visually complex background) on 50% of the trials, participants
missed their target 7% of the time.
● When the same target appeared in this same complex background on only 1% of the
trials, participants missed the target 30% of the time.

The feature present/feature absent effect (Treisman and Gelade, 1980)

● According to the research, if the target differed from the irrelevant items in the display
with respect to a simple feature such as a colour, observers could quickly detect the
target.
● In fact, people can detect this target just as fast when it is presented in a n array of 24
items as when it is presented in an array of only 3 items.
 ● People can typically locate an isolated feature more quickly.
● Pop out, parallel feature search; serial, serial feature search.

Saccadic eye movements during reading

● The final kind if attention task.
● Our movements provide important info about the way our mind operates when we
perform a number of everyday activities, cognitive tasks.
● Researchers also discovered that our eyes move when we are speaking.
● Fovea has better acquits than other retinal regions. Therefore, the eyes must be moved
so that the new words can be registered on the fovea.
● Saccadic eye movement is another example of active cognitive processes; we active
search for new info, including the material we read,
● People make150000 to 2,000,000 saccadic movements every day.
● Fixation occurs during the period between two saccadic movements. During each
fixation, our visual system pauses briefly in order to acquire information that is useful for
reading.
● Perceptual span refers to the number of letters and spaces that we perceive during
fixation.
● Researchers have found large individual differences in the size of perceptual span.
● While reading English, perceptual span normally includes letters lying about 4 positions
to the left of the letter you are directly looking at, as well as letters about 15 positions to
the right of the central character.

Memory

Stages of memory:
Encode, storage/retention and retrieval.
● Ability to remember info, experiences and people.
● Storage is a passive process of retaining info in the brain, whether sensory, STM or
LTM.
● Each if these different stage of memory function as a sort of filter that best helps protects
us from flood of information that confront us on a daily basis, avoiding overload of info
and helping to keep us sane.
● The more the info is repeated or used, the more likely it is to be retained in LTP.
● Fill incomplete data

STM

● German psychologist Ebbinghaus first described primacy and recency effect in the late
19 century as part of the serial position effect in his memory studies.

Serial position effect:

● Primacy effect- rehearsal

 ● Recency effect- result from participant’s using either sensory memory or STM.

STM- RETENTION DURATION AND FORGETTING

● Brown-Peterson Task.
● 20 seconds
● Interference ( proactive and retroactive)
● Trace decay

STM- RETRIEVAL OF INFORMATION

● Sternberg (66, 69)
● Memory set size (parallel search and serial search)
● Sternberg memory search task
●

LTM

● Place for storing large amounts of info for indefinite periods if time.
● Mental treasure chest or scrapbook.
● Explicit and implicit.
● Semantic and episodic
● Thomas Landauer
● Cerebral cortex has 10(13) synapses, so some believe that human memory can hold
10(13) distinct bits of information.
● Another estimate is 10(20) buts, estimated number of neural impulses.
● Landauer argued that bith the estimates are probably too high: not every neural impulse
results in memory.
● He came to an estimate of about 1 billion bits for an adult at midlife (35 years old).
●

LTM Coding

● Errors made while recalling information from from LTM are likely to be due to semantic
confusion.
● Baddeley (1976) concluded that the following generalisation, although not absolute; is
roughly true; semantic similarity affects LTM.
● Kagdila

LTM Retention Duration

● Bahrick (84) test 733 adults who had taken or were taking a high school or university
course in Spanish.
● For the first 3 years after completing Spanish study, participant’s recall declined.
 ● But for the next three decades, forgettting curve was flats, suggesting no further loss of
info.
● It only showed decline after 35 years.
● Permastore State: Refers to highly stable and enduring for of memory retention, where
info remains accessible fir extended period, often a lifetime, with minimal loss.

LTM Forgetting

● Herman Ebbinghaus
● Nonsense syllables
● Experiments on the number of repetitions needed for perfect recall, the nature if
forgetting, the effects of fatigue on learning, and effects of widely spread versus closely
spaced practiced.
● “Forgetting curve”

LTM Retrieval of information: Principles of retrieval for enhancing recall

Categorisation

● Organising info into meaningful categories to enhance recall.

● Structured material is easier to remember than unorganised info.
● Research: Bousfield (1953) demonstrated that categorised word lists lead to better
memory recall.

Encoding specificity

● Recall improves when retrieval conditions match the encoding conditions.

● Research: Thomson and Tulving (1970) found that cues during learning facilitate
memory recall.

Context Effect

● Environmental cues present during encoding help retrieval.

● Godden and Baddeley 1975.

State dependent learning

● Memory retrieval is more effective when an individual’s internal state at retrieval matches
the state at encoding.

Working Memory

● Working memory capacity is linked to intelligence and academic performance,

with higher scores associated with better overall intelligence and school grades.
 ● The phonological loop plays a crucial role in reading ability, as performance on
working memory tests often corrrelates with reading proficiency.
● Central executive functioning is associated with higher cognitive skills.
● Working memory deficits are commonly observed in individuals with ADHD.
● Depression can impair with working memory.

Levels of Procesing (Craik and Lockhart)

The deeper the information is processed the greater the long term memory storage.

Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart proposed LOP Model of memory, which suggestd that
memory retention on how deeply information is processed:

Depths of Processing:
● Shallow Processing involves encoding information based on surface level features
such as sound or appearance. This leads to weaker memory recall.
● Deep Processing involves meaningful analysis, suchj as understanding, making
connections and relating information to existing knowledge, resulting in stronger memory
recall.
Distinctiveness and Elaboration:
● Unique and well differentiated information is easier to remember.
● Connecting new info to prior knowledge enhances recall.
Self Reference Effect
Memory is improved when

Levels of processing

Rich and uniques

● The concept of self provides a highly distinctive and meaningful set of cues, making it
easier to associate new information with existing knowledge.
Enhanced elaboration
● Self referential thinking encourages people to connect personal traits and experiences,
leading to deeper processing and more accurate retrieval of information.
Frequent and Complex rehersal
● Info linked to oneself is rehearsed more frequently and in a more meaningful, elaborate
manner, strengthening memory retention.