Glossary

Binding problem The problem of how different properties of an item are correctly put together, or bound, into the correct combination.

Bottleneck The point in processing where parallel processing becomes serial.

Breakthrough The ability of information to capture conscious awareness despite being unattended. Usually used with respect to the unattended channel in dichotic listening experiments.

Capture The ability of one source of information to take processing priority from another. For example the sudden onset of novel information within a modality such as an apple falling may interrupt ongoing attentional processing.

Conjunction A term from feature integration theory of attention that describes a target defined by at least two separable features, such as a red O amongst green O’s and red T’s.

Consistent mapping A task in which distractors are never targets and targets are never distracters, so that there is a consistent relationship between the stimuli and the responses to be made to them.

Contention scheduler A component of Norman and Shallice’s (1986) model which is responsible for the semi-automatic control of schema activation to ensure that schema run off in an orderly way.

Controlled attention Attention processing that is under conscious, intentional control. It requires attentional resources, or capacity, and is subject to interference.

Covert attentional orienting Orienting attention without making any movement of the eyes.

Early selection Selective attention that operates on the physical information available from early perceptual analysis.

Endogenous attention Attention that is controlled by the intention of a participant.

Exogenous attention Attention that is drawn automatically to a stimulus without the intention of the participant. Processing by exogenous attention cannot be ignored.
Fixation When the fovea of the eye dwells on a location in visual space, during which time information is collected.

Frontal lobe syndrome The pattern of deficits exhibited by patients with damage to the frontal lobes. These patients are distractible, have difficulty setting, maintaining and changing behavioural goals, and are poor at planning sequences of actions.

Galvanic skin response A measurable change in the electrical conductivity of the skin when emotionally significant stimuli are presented. Often used to detect the unconscious processing of stimuli.

Gaze-mediated orienting An exogenous shift of attention following the direction of gaze of a face presented at fixation.

Ideomotor compatibility The compatibility between the stimulus and its required response in terms of, usually, spatial relations.

Late selection An account of selective processing where attention operates after all stimuli have been analysed for their semantic properties.

Masking The disruptive effect of an auditory or visual pattern that is presented immediately after an auditory or visual stimulus. This is backward masking, but there are other types of masking.

Modality The processing system specific to one of the senses, such as vision, hearing or touch.

Overt attentional orienting Making an eye movement to attend to a location.

Pop-out An object will pop out from a display if it is detected in parallel and is different from all other items in the display.

Procedural knowledge Unconscious knowledge about how to do something. It includes skills and knowledge that cannot be made explicit but can be demonstrated by performance.

Production system A computational model based on numerous IF–THEN condition–action rules. IF the rule is represented in working memory THEN the production stored in long-term memory is applied.

Psychological refractory period The time delay between the responses to two overlapping signals that reflects the time required for the first response to be organised before the response to the second signal can be organised.

Saccade The movement of the eyes during which information uptake is suppressed. Between saccades the eye makes fixations during which there is information uptake at the fixated area.

Selection for action The type of attention necessary for planning controlling and executing responses, or actions.

Selection for perception The type of attention necessary for encoding and interpreting sensory data.

Selective filtering An attentional task that requires selection of one source of information for further processing and report in a difficult task such as dichotic listening or visual search for a conjunction of properties.

Selective set An attentional task requiring detection of a target from a small set of possibilities.

Shadowing Used in a dichotic listening task in which participants must repeat aloud the to-be-attended message and ignore the other message.

Slips of action Errors in carrying out sequences of actions, e.g. where a step in the sequence is omitted, or an appropriate action is made, but to the wrong object.

Stroop effect The effect of a well-learned response to a stimulus slowing the ability to make the less-well-learned response; for example, naming the ink colour of a colour word.

Subliminal Below the threshold for conscious awareness or confident report.

Varied mapping The condition in which a stimulus and its response are changed from trial to trial.

• Feature recognition
• Automatic processes
• Treisman’s feature integration experiment

Reading List

Driver, J. (2001). A selective review of selective attention research from the past century. British Journal of Psychology, 92, 53–78.

Styles, E. A. (2005). Attention Perception and Memory: An Integrated Introduction. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Styles, E. A. (2006).The Psychology of Attention (2nd ed.). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Weblinks

Review of cocktail party effect

http://www.media.mit.edu/speech/papers/1992/arons_AVIOSJ92_cocktail_party_effect.pdf