Name : Clas s: Dat e: Visual Attention Multiple Choice 1. _____ described attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” a. Hemlholtz b. Posner c. James d. Rensink ANSWER: c 2. One aspect of the visual system that helps us select specific information from the environment for processing is _____. a. the optic nerve b. the concentration of cones in the fovea c. the blind spot d. the prevalence of amacrine cells in the peripheral retina ANSWER: b 3. Vaco is playing basketball, and does a “no-look” (covert) pass to a teammate. This demonstrates the idea that attention _____. a. is solely the result of eye movements b. can occur without looking at the object c. does not occur even if we are looking straight at an object d. is due to the functioning of the rods ANSWER: b 4. The eye movements that occur as the observer shifts his/her gaze from one part of the visual scene to another are called _____ eye movements. a. pursuit b. magnifie d c. Saccadic d. Aperature ANSWER: c 5. When a person scans a visual scene, he/she usually makes about _____ fixation(s) per second. a. one b. three c. nine d. twelv e ANSWER: b 6. Kelly is participating in an attention study. She is asked to fixate on a cross in the middle of the screen and watch for a word to appear in place of the cross. When the word appears she is using ______ attention to perceive it. a. indirect b. overt c. covert d. focuse d ANSWER: b 7. People tend to fixate first on high contrast or unique (relative to the surrounding area) points in a visual scene. This is a result of _____ and is a _____ process. a. stimulus salience; top-down b. stimulus salience; bottom-up c. the spotlight effect; top-down d. the spotlight effect; bi-directional ANSWER: b 8. Parkhurst et al. (2002) showed that observers make initial fixations in a visual scene based on _____. a. stimulus saliency b. meaningfulness c. stimulus schema d. scotopic representations ANSWER: a 9. _____ can be generated based on saliency principles and used to predict early fixations in a scene. a. Contrast maps b. Salience decoders c. Interest point files d. Saliency maps ANSWER: d 10. Larissa looks at a still picture of a football game. She uses her knowledge of football to look at the quarterback first, then the running backs, then the wide receivers, then the linebackers. This is an example of using _____ to guide attention. a. saliency maps b. retinotopic maps c. knowledge d. the cue approach ANSWER: c 11. Nicki walks into her friend’s bathroom and sees a blender next to the sink. She spends more time looking at that blender than she would have spent looking at a soap dispenser in the same position. Her increased gaze is a reflection of a _____ in action. a. saliency map b. scene schema c. task demand d. mismatch effect ANSWER: b 12. “Learning from past experience” as a factor involved in attention was demonstrated by Shinoda et al. (2001), who showed that drivers are more likely to detect stop signs when they were positioned _____. a. at the middle of a block b. 75 feet from the intersection c. at the intersection d. at random through a neighborhood ANSWER: c 13. Land and Hayhoe (2001) found that _____ are most important in determining fixations when a person makes a peanut butter sandwich. a. the stimulus colors b. the stimulus contrast levels c. the stimulus orientations d. the task demands ANSWER: d 14. Posner’s precueing studies demonstrated that attention _____. a. increases the color perception of objects b. can spread through objects c. eliminates change blindness d. increases the efficiency of information processing ANSWER: d 15. Egly et al. (1994) showed that precueing increases the efficiency of information processing _____. a. only when the cue is in the same position as the target b. when the cue appears in the same rectangle as the target stimulus c. when a cue is in a different rectangle than the target stimulus d. only when the cue is the same color as the target stimulus ANSWER: b 16. The finding that attention can spread within an object, thereby, enhancing detection at other places within the object is referred to as _____. a. spreading activation b. object location invariance c. same-object advantage d. spatial drift ANSWER: c 17. The spreading enhancement effect of attention can help us perceive _____. a. occluded objects b. the oblique effect c. grating stimuli d. illusory conjunctions ANSWER: a 18. The important finding of Carrasco et al.’s (2004) research was that _____. a. two physically identical gratings will always be perceived the same b. the attended-to grating is perceived to have a higher contrast than another, identical grating c. the attended-to grating is perceived to have a lower contrast than another, identical grating d. the attended-to grating is perceived to have a higher contrast when compared to a nonidentical grating ANSWER: b 19. When presented with superimposed images of a house and a face, Mack is asked to focus on the house. This attentional “focus” results in _____. a. increased activity in the FFA b. increased activity in the MT c. increased activity in the PPA d. similar activation changes in the FFA and PPA ANSWER: c 20. In an fMRI study by Datta and DeYoe (2009), participants covertly shifted their attention within a display. This shifting of attention resulted in the activation of _____. a. the same brain regions because the participant’s eyes were not moving b. the same brain regions because the participant was engaging attention c. different brain regions because the participant was attending to different locations d. different brain regions because the participant’s eyes were moving ANSWER: c 21. Based on fMRI data from covert shifts of attention, Datta and DeYoe (2009) developed _____. These tools predicted convert attention to a location with _____% accuracy. a. attention maps; 100 b. saliency maps; 80 c. voxel maps; 95 d. heat maps; 90 : ANSWER: a 22. A monkey attends to a moving stimulus left of fixation then to a stationary stimulus right of fixation. If one were recording MT neuronal activity, it would reveal that _____. a. the neuron preferentially responding to the left stimulus is inactive when attending to the right stimulus b.the neuron preferentially responding to the left stimulus is unaffected by attention to the right stimulus c. the receptive field associated with the neuron responding to the left stimulus shrinks when attention shifts to the right stimulus d.the receptive field associated with the neuron responding to the left stimulus shifts right when attention shifts to the right stimulus ANSWER: a 23. _____ occurs when a stimulus that is not attended is not perceived, even though the person is looking directly at the stimulus. a. Prosopagnosia b. Inattentional blindness c. The Lazarus effect d. Balint’s Syndrome ANSWER: b 24. Simons and Chabris showed a video of students passing a basketball and asked participants to count how many passes made. In the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked through the basketball players for 5 seconds. Approximately how many of the participants reported seeing the “gorilla”? a. 100 b. 77 c. 54 d. 23 ANSWER: c 25. The incidence of change blindness _____ when a cue is added to the scene that indicates which part of the scene has changed. a. increases b. decreases c. remains unchanged d. can increase or decrease, depending on cue duration ANSWER: b 26. Which statement about change blindness is most accurate? a. When sorting blocks according to color in a computer-based task, sudden changes to task-irrelevant features are detected better than changes to task-relevant features. b.When changes are made to a well-known, iconic building or vista, the changes are detected by at least 90% of viewers. c. Changes to objects appearing in their usual locations are more easily detected than those occurring to objects in atypical locations. d.Smokers detect changes to smoking-related objects (e.g., lighters) better than changes to other household objects. ANSWER: d 27. In Grimes’ 1996 study, _____ of subjects failed to detect a change in a model’s swimsuit from bright pink to bright green. a. 38% b. 48% c. 58% d. 68% ANSWER: c 28. In Grimes’ 1996 study, _____ of subjects failed to notice a 180-degree rotation of Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyland. a. 15% b. 25% c. 35% d. 45% ANSWER: b 29. While watching Pretty Woman (1990), you fail to notice when Vivian (Julia Roberts) begins to reach for a croissant that suddenly turns into a pancake. This is an example of _____, which can be a “real-life” example of _____ if you do not notice the switch. a. a contingency break; inattentional blindness b. a continuity error; change blindness c. an attentional lapse; illusory contingency d. a unity break; illusory sequencing ANSWER: b 30. In the _____ procedure, participants attend to a central task, but also have to complete a peripheral task. a. figure-ground b. task demand c. dual-task d. discriminatio n ANSWER: c 31. Which of the following is true regarding task-irrelevant stimuli? a. They are least distracting when you are engaged in a difficult task. b. They are least distracting when you are engaged in an easy task. c. They are most likely to distract you when workload is high. d. They are least likely to distract you when perceptual load is low. ANSWER: a 32. According to feature integration theory, the color, orientation, and other features of objects are initially processed in the _____ stage of processing. a. preattentive b. postattentive c. focused attention d. tertiary ANSWER: a 33. Yasmen is walking in a mall and thinks she sees a man wearing a red dress. She takes a longer look, and realizes she has seen a man in a suit walking next to a woman in a red dress. This is a natural example of _____. a. disjunctive searches b. illusory conjunctions c. scene statistics d. illusory confusion ANSWER: b 34. According to Treisman, the _____ stage is the “glue” that combines all the incoming information about an object. a. Preattentive b. focused attention c. tertiary d. compiling ANSWER: b 35. Treisman and Schmidt prevented the focused attention stage from occurring by _____. a. presenting stimuli for 200 msec b. having observers focus attention on another task c. none of these; focused attention occurs automatically d. using rapid stimulus presentation and directing attention to another task ANSWER: d 36. R.M., a patient with Balint’s syndrome, reported illusory conjunctions on 23% of the trials _____. a. only if the two stimuli were presented for less than 1 second b. only if the two stimuli were presented for less than 2 seconds c. if he was told to attend only to the first stimulus d. even if he was presented the two stimuli for 10 seconds ANSWER: d 37. In the “100=Car Naturalistic Driving Study, the driver was inattentive in some way 3 seconds before _____ of crashes. a. 75% b. 80% c. 85% d. 90% ANSWER: b 38. In a laboratory experiment on the impact of cell phone conversations on driving, drivers missed _____ red lights when talking on the phone as when not talking on the phone. a. about as many b. twice as many c. three times as many d. five times as many ANSWER: b 39. When an infant exhibits dishabituation, the researcher concludes that ____. a. the infant cannot tell the difference between the habituated stimulus and the new stimulus b. the infant can tell the difference between the habituated stimulus and the new stimulus c. the new stimulus causes emotional distress in the infant d. the habituated stimulus is more interesting than the new stimulus ANSWER: b 40. The ability to perceive a rod as being continuous behind an occluding block _____. a. is innate b. is common in one-week-old infants c. can be accomplished by four-month-olds d. occurs only after sharp acuity is developed ANSWER: c 41. Johnson et al. (2004) presented moving occluded rods to 3-month-old infants, and classified the infants as “perceivers” or “nonperceivers” of a unified, occluded rod. The main finding of the study was that _____. a. perceivers and nonperceivers did not differ in eye movements b. perceivers and nonperceivers did not differ in VEP activity c. perceivers tended to make more horizontal eye movements d. perceivers tended to look at the stationary occluder ANSWER: c Essay 42. Discuss the three factors involved in determining what we fixate on in a visual scene. : ANSWER Scene regions that are markedly different from their surroundings, whether in color, : contrast, movement, or orientation, are said to have visual salience. Visually salient objects can attract attention, Attention is influenced by scene schemas – an observer’s knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes. A person’s interests and goals as well as their knowledge can influence attention. 43. Describe Posner et al.’s (1978) precueing procedure, the classic results obtained using this procedure, and the implications for attention theory. ANSWERThe general principle behind a precueing experiment is to determine whether : presenting a cue indicating where a test stimulus will appear enhances the processing of the test stimulus. The subjects in Posner and coworkers’ (1978) experiment kept their eyes stationary throughout the experiment, always looking at the + in the display. They first saw an arrow cue indicating on which side of the target a stimulus was likely to appear. The arrow cue indicates that subjects should focus their attention to the right. (Remember, they do this without moving their eyes, so this is an example of covert attention.) The subjects’ task was to press a key as rapidly as possible when a target square was presented off to the side. The location indicated by the arrow cue was valid 80 percent of the time, but 20 percent of the trials were invalid; that is, the arrow cue indicated that the target was going to be presented on one side but it actually appeared on the other side. For this invalid trial, the arrow cue indicates that the subject should attend to the left, but the target is presented on the right. The results of this experiment indicate that subjects reacted more rapidly on valid trials than on invalid trials. Posner interpreted this result as showing that information processing is more effective at the place where attention is directed. This result and others like it gave rise to the idea that attention operates like a spotlight or zoom lens that improves processing when directed toward a particular location. 44. (a) Define inattentional blindness. (b) Describe the method and results of Simons and Chabris (1999) research on inattentional blindness. ANSWERResearch has shown not only that we miss things that are out of our field of view, but : that not attending can cause us to miss things even if we are looking directly at them. One example of this is a phenomenon called inattentional blindness. The idea that attention can affect perception of overlapping scenes was tested in an experiment by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (1999), who created a 75-second film that showed two “teams” of three players each. One team, dressed in white, was passing a basketball around, and the other was “guarding” that team by following them around and putting their arms up as in a basketball game. Subjects were told to count the number of passes, a task that focused their attention on the team wearing white. After about 45 seconds, one of two events occurred. Either a woman carrying an umbrella or a person in a gorilla suit walked through the “game,” an event that took 5 seconds. After seeing the video, subjects were asked whether they saw anything unusual happen or whether they saw anything other than the six players. Nearly half of the observers (46%) failed to report that they saw the woman or the gorilla. This experiment demonstrated that when people are attending to one sequence of events, they can fail to notice another event, even when it is right in front of them 45. (a) What is the relationship between change blindness and continuity errors? (b) Describe a specific example of a “continuity error”. ANSWER The difficulty in detecting changes in scenes is called change blindness. Change : blindness occurs regularly in popular films, in which some aspect of the scene, which should remain the same, changes from one shot to the next. Have you ever noticed that, in the Wizard of Oz (1939), Dorothy’s (Judy Garland’s) hair changes length many times from short to long and back again? Were you surprised while watching Pretty Woman (1990) when Vivian (Julia Roberts) began to reach for a croissant for breakfast that suddenly turned into a pancake? Were you confused watching a scene in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) when Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) suddenly changed where he was sitting during a conversation in the Great Hall? These changes in films, called continuity errors, have been well documented on the Internet (search for “continuity errors in movies”). 46. (a) Discuss how Treisman’s feature integration theory addresses the binding problem. (b) What are illusory conjunctions, and why are they support for feature integration theory? ANSWERFeature integration theory (FIT) tackles the question of how we perceive individual : features as parts of the same object. We will begin by describing the theory’s claims, and then we will review the empirical evidence supporting them. According to FIT, the first step in object processing is the preattentive stage. As its name implies, the preattentive stage occurs before we focus attention on an object. Because attention is not involved, researchers argue that this stage is automatic, unconscious, and effortless. In this stage, the features of objects are analyzed independently in separate areas of the brain and are not yet associated with a specific object. These independent features are then combined in a second stage of processing, called the focused attention stage. In this two-stage process, you can think of visual features as components of a “visual alphabet.” At the very beginning of the process, perceptions of each of these components exist independently of one another, just as the letter tiles in a game of Scrabble exist as individual units when the tiles are scattered at the beginning of the game. However, just as the individual Scrabble tiles are combined to form words, the individual features combine to form perceptions of whole objects. Illusory conjunctions occur when features from different stimuli are combined. They can occur even if the stimuli differ greatly in shape and size. According to FIT, these illusory conjunctions occur because the divided attention task reduces subjects’ ability to focus their attention on the shapes, and this allows independent visual features to be combined incorrectly. 47. Explain the load theory of attention. ANSWERLavie proposed the load theory of attention, which involves two key concepts: : perceptual capacity and perceptual load (Lavie, 2005, 2010). Perceptual capacity refers to the idea that a person has a certain capacity that can be used for carrying out perceptual tasks. Perceptual load is the amount of a person’s perceptual capacity needed to carry out a particular perceptual task. Some tasks, especially easy, wellpracticed ones, have low perceptual loads; these low-load tasks use up only a small amount of the person’s perceptual capacity. Other tasks, those that are difficult and perhaps not as well practiced, are high-load tasks and use more of a person’s perceptual capacity. Lavie proposes that the amount of perceptual capacity that remains as a person is carrying out a task determines how susceptible the person is to being distracted by task-irrelevant stimuli. 48. (a) Describe the “occluded rod” paradigm. (b) Describe what it revealed about the relationship between perceptual completion, motion perception, attention, and scan paths in infants. ANSWERThe occluded rod paradigm presents a stimulus consisting of a rod moving back and : forth behind a rectangular occluder. Adults perceive rod as a single rod that extends behind the rectangle. Using habituation, researchers have found that new born infants see the moving rods as two separate units and not as a single rod extending behind the occluder. When researchers tested 2-month-olds and obtained results for some of the infants that were similar to those for the 4-month-olds, they argued that the ability to use movement as a way to organize the perceptual world develops rapidly over the ﬁrst few months of life. They labeled the infants who demonstrated perceptual completion perceivers and those who did not, nonperceivers. Additional research found that perceivers ﬁxated mainly on the rod, whereas nonperceivers ﬁxated on the rectangular occluder. Eye movement records also showed that, as a group, perceivers made more horizontal eye movements than nonperceivers. The perceivers, therefore, tended to look at the rod and follow its movement, whereas the nonperceivers looked more at the stationary occluder and other parts of the display that were not related to perceiving the rod as extending behind the occluder. 49. Are voice-activated devices in cars a good idea or are they potentially dangerous? Explain your reasoning. ANSWERA 2004 article in the New York Times titled “Hi, I’m Your Car. Don’t Let Me Distract : You” notes that many cars have distraction- producing devices such as GPS systems and menu screens for computer controls (Peters, 2004). In the decade since that article appeared, the number of distracting devices available for cars has greatly increased. For example, voice-activated apps are available that enable drivers to make movie or dinner reservations, send and receive texts or emails, and make postings on social media. While this sounds like fun, it is important to note that a recent study from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety titled Measuring Cognitive Distraction in the Automobile found voice-activated activities to be more distracting, and therefore potentially more dangerous, than either hands-on or hands-free cell phones. The study concludes that “just because a new technology does not take the eyes off the road does not make it safe to be used while the vehicle is in motion” (Strayer et al., 2013). 50. How is talking on a cell phone while driving different from talking to passengers while driving? ANSWEROne way to appreciate the difference between talking on a cell phone and what often : happens when talking to a passenger is to imagine the situation in which you place a call to your friend’s cell phone. Your friend answers and you start talking. As far as you are concerned, you are just having a phone conversation. But unbeknownst to you, the person you called is driving and is in the process of negotiating his way through heavy traffic, or is perhaps reacting to a car that has just cut in front of him, traveling 70 miles per hour on the highway. The question to ask yourself is, would you be having the same conversation if you were a passenger sitting next to the driver? As a passenger, you would be aware of the traffic situation and would be able to react by pausing the conversation or perhaps warning the driver of upcoming hazards (sometimes called “backseat driving”!). It is also relevant to consider the social demands of phone conversations. Because it is generally considered poor form to suddenly stop talking or to pause for long periods on the phone, the person talking on the phone while driving might continue talking even when driving is becoming challenging.