COGLABS
Attentional Blink
Basic Questions
1. The main function of attention is directing what is perceived
2. Attentional Blink tells us that attention is definitely not perfect. Attention Is not
good enough to get everything into our minds.
3. Response, because the experiment asks for the participants to respond to a string
of letters if we saw a K or a J.
Advanced Questions
1. Would love to answer this, but nothing anywhere tells me how to calculate my
attentional blink in ms so can’t.
2. Some occupations affected by attentional blink could be a bank teller or a cashier.
3. Ways attentional blink affect these occupations are one in the same. Counting
money. Someone hands a bank clerk money to deposit, they can miscount
because they didn’t pay attention to a subsequent bill. The same can go for a
cashier too.
Change Detection
Basic Questions
1. I thought it was harder with the flicker because it broke your attention towards the
stimulus. The data supports my feelings because the RT was less and the
Proportion correct was higher.
2. The flicker breaks attention.
3. Search strategy for the no-flicker is a kin to the pop-out effect. You notice when
something is different right away. For the flicker, however, you search
everything one item at a time all over again when the second image is shown.
Advanced Questions
1. Reaction time is reported because you can tell which condition was more
effecting, flicker or no flicker.
2. Flicker condition. People miss cues driving when they’re not watching the road
and doing other things. This is how accidents happen.
3. I can’t honestly think of a situation or experience I had where a flash was used to
divert my attention.
Blind Spot
Basic questions
1. I didn’t have a blind spot…. I saw the dot each time.
2. Cannot answer. Nothing caused my blind spot because I didn’t have one for this
experiment..
3. I don’t think cognitively anything affects the blind spot. It’s more of a physical
situation based on an individual’s peripheral vision range.
Advanced questions
1. With the left eye closed, it forces the right eye to focus away from where the dot
is going to appear by looking at the fixation point. Also, it’s easier to collect
accurate data for the right eye with the left eye closed, thus eliminating any input
from the left eye all together.
2. The dot would need to be even further back than it was for this experiment. I
could only barely see the dots at the back, but could still see them. If they were a
cell back they would have been gone
3. Everyday situation people miss things because of their blind spot. Just sitting at a
computer you can’t see people walking up to you from behind. Or walking down
the street, you can’t tell what color a car is if it’s outside your field of vision.
Stroop Effect
Basic questions
1. I was faster with incongruent conditions, which is very surprising. I fully
expected to be faster with or the same as the congruent. With the colors and
names being the same, then it should be easier to connect the two.
2. It is easier to connect color and name if they are the same. And the process of
reading is too automatic and is then faster than thinking of the color.
3. I imagine there would be little difference because reading the word is much
easier than thinking of the color. Because our reading is so automatic, it overrides
cognitive thought for the most part.
Advanced questions.
1. One strategy is to not look at the word as a whole, but only a small portion of the
word to recognize the color and not entirely to word.
2. Reading, writing, and walking.
3. More errors are made for the incongruent conditions than they are for the
congruent.
4. White is with go and red is with stop. The red with stop seems congruent because
red is associated with stop in other places, mianly traffic lights being the primary
example. But white for go is incongruent, because go is usually associated with
green.
Simon Effect
Basic Questions
1. The conflict is between the position of the square and the color of the square.
2. Stimulus identification
3. My Simon Effect was relatively equal to the global data. I imagine this is because
the global data has many participants and thus a more accurate mean that can be
generalized across most populations.
Advanced Questions
1. Stove knobs and corresponding burners confuse me enough already on a regular
basis. A positive aspect is how the knobs are set to correspond to the burners in a
nice pattern. The problematic part is where the knobs are placed. Instead of up
top, they could be more readily and easy to identify by placing them on the sides.
2. Turn left. The pedestrian is coming for from the right, so in order to not hit them,
you need to swerve where they are not.
3. On a billboard for McDonalds with a McDonalds half a mile down the road.
Also, a stop sign, which tells you to stop by the shape and color of the sign when
you get to the crosswalk.
Spatial Cueing
Basic Questions
1. No. People daydream everyday. So it’s impossible for attention to always be
focused where the eyes are.
2. The arrows. The Location of the square
3. Endogenous cue are the arrows that point to a location. Exogenous cues is the
square that appears in a random location either away or towards the arrow.
Advanced Questions
1. They use this strategy because it’s more helpful in preparing the body for a quick
reaction to where the ball goes by knowing beforehand which way the kicker
intends to shoot the ball.
2. A baseball player up to bat will watch the pitcher to see where he throws the ball
in order to react to it. They will follow the invalid cues because they are
instinctively used to looking for cues and fall into a gambler effect. “Maybe the
next time I’ll see it right.”
3. They would be greater because the cue is already prepping the brain to fire red or
blue neuron receptors, so the work is already done when the stimulus is shown.
Apparent Motion
Basic Questions
1. Interstimuls Interval. , or the time between both stimuli. Depending on the length
of the ISI, it changes how the dots appear to the observer
2. 0.1 was the shortest. O.25 was the longest.
3. See 2 dots simulationless. They see one dot flash on and off, then the second dot
flashes on and off.
Advanced Questions
1. 963.4 for personal data. 621.36 for the group.
2. Blinds covering a window sometimes appear to be moving for me…but that can
also be due to my eyes constantly moving back and forth since I was born….Not
really sure what else to answer with besides radiators or grids.
3. How far apart the stimuli are. If they’re too close then it can facilitate apparent
motion by seeing them move closer to each other. If they are too far away, they
they just appear to be standing still.
Garner Interference
Basic Questions
1. I had the Integral version. I did not think there was any difficulty in this
experiment at all. The only time I got one wrong was when I pressed the wrong
key by accident.
2. The global data for integral does match the predicted pattern. It says that Integral
experiment is supposed to be harder and that reaction times should vary
depending on the trial, which the shortest RT is for the correlated trial just as
predicted.
3. Saturation is Integral and size is separable.
Advanced Questions
1. This is the same as the Attentional Blink questions….
2. They seem to contradict. You would think that longer reaction times would mean
a higher correct percentage, but for the filtering and baseline, the percent correct
is lower than the correlated trial.
3. No. Because the color or saturation of blue can be deceiving because it is integral
data, which as we have learned, is harder to perceive.
Signal Detection
Basic Questions
1. Hit – Signal is present and reported present, Miss – Signal is present and reported
not presentFalse Alarm – Signal is not present, but reported present Correct
Rejection – Signal is not present and reported not present
2. My sensitivity averages are close to the same of that of the global data. That
means I’m not too different from the other participants.
3. They should both be lower and closer to the 0.2 for False Alarm and 0.05 for
miss.
Advanced Questions
1. They can sense a signal exceptionally well.
2. The radio can be nothing but noise until finding a channel that comes in. Another
example could actually be the cocktail party effect.
3. Musicians use audio signals to determine if they’re doing good or not. People
measuring radiation levels are signaled when there is presence of radiation.
Teachers also use signals when every student in the class gets an F on a test to reevaluate their work.
Encoding Specificity
Basic Questions
1. My best recall was Cue A with None. There is no weak or strong cue given, just
Cue A and Cue B and None. Apparently A and B are not systematically different
as they only report whether I saw the cue or not.
2. The properties present during encoding and recall are the most important in
helping recall.
3. No, strong memory cues are not always better than weak memory cues because,
again it depends more on what is present during encoding than the strength of the
cue. I can be in the need of remembering a word and have the definition given to
me (strong memory cue) but not remember it until I see a candy wrapper of a
candy bar I saw someone eating when I learned the word. (Weak cue)
Advanced Questions
1. The in-car test is important because the driver needs to be able to function and
operate the controls of the car that you can only learn effectively by doing rather
than reading in a book. The in-car test tests the person’s ability to do so.
2. First I would tell them to study right before falling asleep to help better encode
the data through the hippocampus during sleep. Second I woud tell them they
need to study earlier in the day closer to the time they have class. Either right
before or right after.
3. Location of the stimuls (the person) in relation to where you know them from
(work)
Metacontrast Masking
Basic Questions
1. Stimulus Onset Asynchrony
2. 30.0 and 150.0 were exactly the same and the best. My worse was at 0.0. My
results are not too different from the typical findings, at least based on the global
data. Their data for 30.0 and 150.0 s also close to the same and relatively better
than the rest.
3. We do not see and perceive everything correctly. Some things are constantly
being masked.
Advanced Questions
1. Well,, I would guess at the 30.0 and150.0 levels since those are where I did best
at. The global data indicates the 30.0 150.0 and 180.0 as their best, so would
again guess those to be where near perfect would be scored.
2. Probably about the same as random guessing because you have a 25% chance to
guess right anyhow being there’s four possible answers.
3. I was watching an episode of Burn Notice where the main character was talking to
a guy under an overpass filled with sound so another spy trying to find out what
they were saying could not hear them with any devices.
Position Error
Basic Questions
1. 2 and 4
2. It shows that memory makes errors in short term circumstances.
3. position 1 and position 4
Advanced Questions
1. Items 2 and 4 seem to be related in being more difficult to respond to correctly.
2. 70%, 30% 60%, 30%, 40%, 60% 70%
3. The best place to look would be somewhere in the middle. Position errors are the
errors to look for.
Sternberg Search
Basic Questions
1. The more items the longer the search
2. When STM is searched and cannot match the target item. Exhaustive search
deciding whether or not the item is in STM
3. No, it’s not consistent. My longest search was actually at 1. I think it was
because I kept getting confused with the keys when I did the experiment and thus
my data is not very accurate.
Advanced Questions
1. My data supports neither I do not think, because the data isn’t accurate. My data
didn’t turn out as predicted and is far too long and wide spread apart.
2. Again, it’s really hard if not impossible, to predict future data with incorrect or
tainted data. But using what data I have, I would guess that it would not sway too
much from the 793 area for absent or present.
3. A linear relationship is when two variables are directly related. With my data I
would say that is not the case.