Cherry's "cocktail party effect" (1953) demonstrated that people can follow one conversation in a noisy room. What did his dichotic listening studies also reveal?

A: People can accurately report the content of the unattended message

B: People notice their own name in the unattended channel, suggesting some semantic processing occurs outside attention

C: Attention is entirely controlled by bottom-up stimulus features

D: The brain processes both auditory streams equally until a decision is made

Correct: People notice their own name in the unattended channel, suggesting some semantic processing occurs outside attention

Participants shadowing one audio channel heard almost nothing of the other channel's content — but they reliably noticed their own name when it appeared. This "own-name effect" suggested that the unattended channel is not completely filtered out; some meaningful content (particularly personally relevant stimuli) receives processing even without focused attention. It challenged early filter models that assumed complete early attenuation of unattended inputs.

Simons and Chabris's gorilla experiment (1999) is a classic demonstration of:

A: Change blindness — failure to detect changes in a scene over time

B: Inattentional blindness — failure to notice an unexpected, clearly visible object when attention is focused elsewhere

C: Divided attention — the difficulty of performing two tasks simultaneously

D: Attentional blink — a brief period after detecting one target when a second is missed

Correct: Inattentional blindness — failure to notice an unexpected, clearly visible object when attention is focused elsewhere

Participants asked to count ball passes were so focused on the task that roughly half failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene and beating their chest. This inattentional blindness shows that we do not see everything in front of our eyes — perception requires attention. The findings have serious real-world implications for eyewitness testimony, surgical monitoring, and road safety.

Change blindness refers to:

A: The failure to detect stimuli that suddenly appear in peripheral vision

B: The striking failure to notice large changes in a visual scene, particularly across a brief interruption

C: The inability to identify familiar faces after brain injury

D: Adaptation to constant visual stimuli so they become invisible over time

Correct: The striking failure to notice large changes in a visual scene, particularly across a brief interruption

Rensink et al. demonstrated that people fail to detect substantial changes to images (e.g., an aircraft engine disappearing) when the change occurs during a brief flicker, cut, or distraction. This implies that vision does not automatically create a rich, stable internal representation of the world — we store far less than we believe. Change blindness has implications for eyewitness reliability and the design of safety-critical systems.

Top-down attentional control differs from bottom-up attentional capture in which way?

A: Top-down attention is driven by stimulus salience; bottom-up by goals and expectations

B: Top-down attention is goal-directed, guided by expectations and task demands; bottom-up is triggered automatically by salient or unexpected stimuli

C: Top-down attention is processed in the occipital lobe; bottom-up in the frontal lobe

D: Both are equivalent in speed but differ in duration

Correct: Top-down attention is goal-directed, guided by expectations and task demands; bottom-up is triggered automatically by salient or unexpected stimuli

Top-down (endogenous) attention reflects voluntary, goal-directed selection — you direct attention where your task requires. Bottom-up (exogenous) attention is stimulus-driven — a sudden loud noise or flashing light captures attention automatically, regardless of your goals. In everyday life both systems interact: you may be searching for your keys (top-down) and be distracted by your phone notification (bottom-up).

The "attentional spotlight" metaphor suggests that:

A: Attention can only process one object at a time, regardless of location

B: Attention acts like a spotlight that can be directed to regions of space, enhancing processing within its beam

C: Attention is uniformly distributed across the visual field

D: Attentional resources are exhausted after prolonged focus

Correct: Attention acts like a spotlight that can be directed to regions of space, enhancing processing within its beam

The spotlight metaphor (Posner, 1980) captures how spatial attention can be directed to a location before an eye movement, enhancing detection of stimuli that appear there. The spotlight can be moved covertly (without eye movements), is influenced by both top-down goals and bottom-up salience, and can vary in size (zooming in narrows focus but increases resolution; zooming out broadens it but reduces detail).

Sustained attention (vigilance) refers to the ability to maintain focused attention over extended periods. Research on vigilance consistently shows that:

A: Performance on vigilance tasks improves steadily over time as the task becomes familiar

B: Detection accuracy declines markedly after 20–30 minutes on monotonous monitoring tasks

C: Caffeine has no effect on sustained attention

D: Vigilance is entirely determined by sleep quality the night before

Correct: Detection accuracy declines markedly after 20–30 minutes on monotonous monitoring tasks

The "vigilance decrement" — a reliable decline in detection of rare, unpredictable target signals over time — has been observed since Mackworth's wartime radar-monitoring studies. It reflects both resource depletion and disengagement when events are rare. This has major implications for safety-critical monitoring roles (air traffic control, radiology, surgical supervision) and is a key reason for mandatory break schedules and alert systems in such environments.

The attentional blink refers to which phenomenon?

A: A brief period of visual blindness caused by rapid eye movements

B: The failure to detect a second target when it appears approximately 200–500 ms after a first target in a rapid serial visual stream

C: The tendency to look away from emotionally disturbing images

D: The reduction in peripheral vision when fixating on a central target

Correct: The failure to detect a second target when it appears approximately 200–500 ms after a first target in a rapid serial visual stream

The attentional blink (Raymond, Shapiro & Arnell, 1992) describes a temporal bottleneck: when two targets appear in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream in quick succession, the second target is often missed if it falls within roughly 200–500 ms of the first. The prevailing explanation is that consolidating the first target into working memory temporarily depletes attentional resources. A notable exception is "lag-1 sparing" — the second target is not missed when it appears immediately after the first, before consolidation of the first target has fully begun.

The Stroop task demonstrates that automatic processes can interfere with controlled, intentional behaviour.

Answer: True

In the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935), participants name the ink colour of colour words (e.g., the word "RED" written in blue ink). Reading the word is highly automated and interferes with the intentional task of naming the colour, producing slower and more error-prone responses. The Stroop effect is one of the most replicable findings in psychology and is a standard measure of attentional control and executive function — the ability to override a prepotent, automatic response.