Attention
Modified: 2026-01-20 7:39 PM CST
Attention is likely the most basic process in cognitive psychology. Chapter 2 focuses on Cherry's 'cocktail party' problem while chapter 6 looks at the Stroop Test. The influence of both is covered.
Chapter 2 Attention: Beyond Cherry's (1953) Cocktail Party Problem--Michael W. Eysenck
- Background of the Classic Study
- Attention is cognition's starting point
- James saw attention as a major issue in psychology
- Woodworth's coverage was limited to attention span, apprehension span, and mostly the visual modality
- Behaviorism had trouble with attention because it was neither a stimulus or a response.
- Cherry came from outside mainstream psychology (radar research)
- Compare him to Wegener and his troubles in promoting continental drift in geology
- The cocktail party phenomenon
- Detailed Description of the Classic Study
- Important problem
- Cherry's experiments
- Both ears, two messages (sentences), same time. Participants had to shadow one message, they could replay message. Incredibly difficult to perform this task. Top-down process.
- Both ears, two messages (unrelated clichés), same time. Participants could not distinguish one message from another. No top-down process.
- Each ear (dichoic technique), two messages (sentences), same time. Participants could shadow one ear but could not remember message in other ear.
- Each ear, two messages (sentences, one shadowed, one not). Participants could not identify any word in unshadowed (and did not realize it was in German).
- Each ear, unshadowed in female voice or pure tone.
- Findings
- Physical differences in messages helped
- Difficult to detect words in unshadowed
- Delayed (but same message) to each ear
- Issue
- Cherry paid little attention to theoretical basis of results
- Impact of the Classic Study
- Great impact and still highly cited
- Broadbent's filter theory
- Auditory physical aspects extracted in parallel fashion
- Meanings processed serially (limited)
- Also limiting were short-term memory (Miller, 1956) and central processing units (CPUs) in computers
- Treisman's Attenuation Theory
- Sperling's Full and Partial Reports
- Efficient brain mechanisms discovered
- Critique of the Classic Study
- Limitations
- N = 1
- Lack of methodological detail
- No statistics
- Listeners coulc not see lip movements
- Moray's ability to shadow digits (67% vs 8%)
- Auditory and pictures simultaneously (pictures remembered at 90%)
- Retrospective questioning
- Online processing (e.g., electric shock)
- Slippage (unconscious shifting from one message to another)
- Temporal coherence of: timbre, pitch, frequency, and spatial location
- Interactionist vs Autonomous theory
- Underestimated complexities
- Subsequent research increased theoretical understanding of the effect.
- Conclusions
- Selective attention research
- Simple task with applications to real world
- Revealed ecological validity as important variable
Chapter 6 Attention: Beyond Stroop's (1935) Color-Word Interference Phenomenon--Colin M. MacLeod
- Background of the Classic Study
- Cattell: words faster to read than objects or colors were to name
- Automaticity
- Think of an experienced driver driving a vehicle, it's automatic. What happens when a storm hits? Turn off audio, slow down, concentrate more on driving
- Stroop Effect Demo
- Detailed Description of the Classic Study
- Interference theory predominant
- Stroop wished to study memory 'online'
- Experiment 1
- Read words with incompatible colors and words printed in black (no difference)
- Experiment 2
- Name print colors of words and name color patches (statistically significant difference)
- Many misreport Stroop's experiments
- His results show a powerful interference phenomenon
- Impact of the Classic Study
- Stroop's work is in nearly all general psychology textbooks
- While highly cited now, it was not so after study was published for some 30 years
- Three factors led to its resurgence of interest::
- Klein (1964)
- Computer controlled experiments
- Dyer (1973) review article
- Led to 'horse race' model
- Newer explanations:
- Posner and Snyder ((1985) serial processing
- Response competition
- Time relations
- Words often facilitate vocal output
- Little or no interference until close to output
- Townsend (1976) and Taylor (1977) parallel processing
- Word and color processed simultaneously with crosstalk
- Better for automaticity account
- Banich (2019) neuroimaging
- Lateral prefrontal brain areas early
- Medial prefrontal brain areas later
- Parallel or serial?
- Glaser and Glaser (1982)
- Reverse Stroop contradicts 'horse race'
- Dunbar and MacLeod (1984)
- Words turned upside down and backwards
- Changed analysis from serial to parallel processing
- Later, Stroop used for:
- Attention
- Automaticity
- Semantic memory
- Bilingual memory association
- Reading
- Aging
- Schizophrenia
- ADHD
- Cognitive control (debate here)
- Critique of the Classic Study
- New Explanations of the Stroop Effect
- Connectionist Theory (this theory will be looked at often in this course)
- Psycholinguistic Theory: Response competition between word and color
- Memory Based Structures: Dimensional Uncertainty and Dimensional Imbalance
- Word color contingency is important and underappreciated
- Stroop Experiments should control for: response type (e.g., button press vs vocal response)
- Stroop experiments provide rich domain for theory development
- How the Classic Study Advanced Thinking?
- Stroop, himself, not interested in his legacy (MacLeod, 1991b)
- Uses and Variants
- Picture-Word task
- Emotional Stroop task (for psychopathologies)
- What does task measure?
- Attentional selectivity
- Failure to select
- Inhibition
- Extent of learning
- Executive or Cognitive Control
- Conclusions
- Valuable tool for exploring cognitive functioning
- Simple task illustrating failure or error proneness
- Still in use in cognitive psychology
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