Introduction to Cognitive Psychology - Department of Psychological ...

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/13AttentionPSY 200Greg FrancisLecture 13Should you pay $59.95 forMega-speed reading?Purdue UniversityAttentionWe saw last time that attention can havevery powerful effects when it is focused on one thing, you ignoreother thingsToday we want to consider some morespecific properties of attention and look at experimental methods that areused to study attentionPurdue UniversityCharacteristics of attentionBy identifying the properties andcharacteristics of attention we can deduceproperties of the underlying systems thatare involved in cognition whether attention is thought of as a system or as a by-product of other systemsLook at temporal featuralPurdue UniversityAttentional blink Suppose you have to identify rapidly presented (100ms) letters e.g., detect J and/or K in a stream of lettersMPKRWSPurdue UniversityAttentional blinkTurns out that detection of first letter tends to makedetection of the second letter very difficult if it immediately follows the first Attentional blinkMPKRJSAttentional blinkMeasure frequency of detection class data (183 observers)Implies thatdetecting thefirst lettercausesyou to miss thesecond letter!Purdue UniversityPurdue UniversityPSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1