Chapter 4 Practice Quizzes

. William James claimed, "Everyone knows what attention is." What would most researchers today say about that?

James was correct.

Defining attention is very difficult; "attention" has a variety of meanings.

Although his initial definition was flawed, we now know what attention is.

The majority of researchers agree with James.

. What underpins the ability to choose which of many incoming messages to attend to and which messages to ignore?

Dichotic listening

Late selection

Selective attention theory

Early selection theory

. What laboratory-based task did Colin Cherry develop that is arguably equivalent to the real-life situation experienced when trying to focus on one conversation while many other conversations are simultaneously occurring?

It was called the shadowing task and required people to shadow one of two messages presented over headphones.

It was called selective looking and required people to choose amongst two simultaneously presented visual events.

It was called the cocktail party effect.

It involved the presentation of simultaneous auditory messages with the task to attend to both of them.

. What have the results of Stroop test experiments often been used to illustrate?

The early selection view of attention

The ability to attend to one conversation in a crowded room where many other conversations are going on

The part of the brain responsible for recognizing colours

The distinction between controlled and automatic processes

. Which area of the brain has been associated with top-down bias that favours the selection of task-relevant information?

DLPFC

Nystagmus

ACC

V1

. Which of the following statements about the inattentional blindness paradigm used by Mack and Rock is true?

It showed that people fail to perceive task-irrelevant events when attention is directed to another task.

It showed that the unnoticed stimulus can still modulate behaviour, despite a lack of conscious perception.

It showed that faces capture attention in situations where other stimulus categories such as simple circles do not.

All of the above

. What did Lavie, Ro, and Russell find about face processing in their version of the flanker task?

Face processing is involuntary.

Participants "gave up" on attending to faces when the task became too difficult.

We can more easily ignore faces than other distractor items.

Face processing occurs in a different part of the brain than processing of other distractor items.

. What did Hazeltine, Teague, and Ivry find about central bottlenecks in highly practised tasks?

Central bottlenecks do not exist.

Central bottlenecks can be avoided in practised tasks when the stimulus and response phases of each process involve the same modality.

Practice has no effect on central bottlenecks.

A central bottleneck can be overcome with practice.

. What type of errors do people make when performing the sustained attention to response task (SART)?

Omission errors

Commission errors

Omission and commission errors

Default network errors

. Which of the following best represents a task-switching cost?

Listening to music while you work out

Listening to music during the attentional blink task

Failing to stop quickly while driving because you were talking on your phone

Cooking turkey in the oven while simultaneously preparing the gravy on the stove

. To account for vigilance decrements, the underload view proposes that ______.

we have limited attentional resources

vigilance tasks have high attentional demands

we become bored with the task

there is no cost to sustained attention in vigilance tasks

. The idea that overt and covert attention are tightly connected is captured in ______.

the attention as a spotlight hypothesis

the sequential attention hypothesis

the structural limits hypothesis

the domain-specific hypothesis

. Which area of the brain is suggested to detect tendencies for response conflicts like those demonstrated in the Stroop task?

DLPFC

ACC

FFA

PFC

. The reversed cueing effect at long intervals between a cue and target is known as ______.

the central cueing effect

the stimulus onset asynchrony

attention capture

inhibition of return

. What percent of the population would be what Watson and Strayer (2010) consider supertaskers?

0.0025%

0.025%

2.5%

25%

. What is the general finding from task-switching research?

Our attention is regulated by top-down processes.

Our attention is regulated by bottom-up processes.

There is very little cost to performance when we task-switch.

We are consciously aware of the cognitive operations required to switch tasks.

. Research using the moving windows technique suggests that the minimum number of characters that need to be visible to not affect reading is ______.

6 to 9

10 to 13

17 to 20

33 to 36

. The research of Yarbis (1967) indicates that when viewing a face, ______.

we initially fixate our eyes on the periphery of the face

we initially fixate our eyes on the face and mouth

we initially fixate our eyes on the nose; then move them to the eyes; and then to the periphery of the face

our eye fixations are randomly distributed across the face

. The quiet eye involves all of the following except ______.

focusing the eyes on the optimal location of the target

maintaining eye focus on the target as action is initiated

ending eye focus on the target as action is initiated

holding the eyes on the optimal location for an extended period of time

. Automatic process may also be described as ______, and controlled process as ______.

bottom-up; top-down

top-down; bottom-up

goal-directed; voluntary

involuntary; stimulus-directed

. The reverse of attention capture is inattentional blindness.

True

False

. Faces have the ability to automatically capture attention and therefore cannot be ignored.

True

False

. The attentional blink paradigm demonstrates that the second target is not consciously or unconsciously processed.

True

False

. According to the sequential attention hypothesis, overt attention moves first, followed by covert attention.

True

False

. Proponents of the quiet eye technique would suggest that you could be a better golfer if only you fixated your eyes a little bit longer on the ball and on the hole before putting the ball.

True

False

. In the reading process, visual information is transmitted to the brain during saccades.

True

False

. Inattentional blindness has been offered as a possible explanation for déjà vu.

True

False

. Endogenous shifts of attention are also known as attention capture.

True

False

. A minority of individuals are resistant to dual-task interference.

True

False

. According to the structural limits hypothesis, doing two visual tasks at the same time would be difficult.

True

False

Quiz Content