A popular subject within psychology is that of selective attention, particularly visual, auditory or visual and auditory attention (Driver, 2001). There are many theories of visual and auditory attention that provide us with a greater understanding of the ways in which humans attend to different stimuli (Driver, 2001), such as Broadbent’s (1958) filter theory of attention for example. This essay will compare and contrast theories of visual and auditory attention as well as discussing how well these theories explain how we attend to objects. The essay will consist of three auditory attention theories of Broadbent’s filter theory, Treisman’s (1964) attenuation theory, and Deutsch and Deutsch’s (1963) late selection model of attention; and two models of visual attention known as the spotlight model, such as Treisman and Gelade’s (1980) feature integration model, and the zoom-lens model of visual attention (see Styles, 2006). Broadbent’s (1958) filter theory of attention proposes that there is a filter device between sensory identification and short-term memory.
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Abstract The idea of mental imagery has always been a controversial subject in the field of psychology. Many psychologists have argued that such a concept is impossible to measure because it can not be directly observed. Though they are right about this, it is not impossible to measure how quickly mental rotations of images are processed in our brains. Subjects in this experiment were presented two shapes simultaneously, via computer screen, and asked to make judgement, as quickly as possible, as to whether the two shapes presented were the same or mirror images. Two different shapes were used in this experiment, each given as often as the other.
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Research using spectrograms in an attempt to identify invariant features of formant frequency patterns for each phoneme have revealed several problems with this theory, including a lack of invariance in phoneme production, assimilation of phonemes, and the segmentation problem. An alternative theory was developed based on evidence of categorical perception of phonemes: Liberman’s Motor Theory of Speech Perception rests on the postulation that speech sounds are recognised through identification of how the sounds are produced. He proposed that as well as a general auditory processing module there is a separate module for speech recognition, which makes use of an internal model of articulatory gestures. However, while this theory initially appeared to account for some of the features of speech perception, it has since been subject to major criticism, and other models have been put forward, such as Massaro’s fuzzy logic model of perception. The acoustic speech signal itself can be analysed by creating spectrograms.
False memory, second to forgetting, is one of the two fundamental types of deformation in episodic memory (Holliday, Brainerd & Reyna, 2010). Simply stated, false memory is the propensity to account normal occurrences as being a fraction of a key experience that in actuality was not an element of that experience (Holliday, Brainerd & Reyna). False memories are something nearly everyone experience. Furthermore, false memory is defined as placed together, constructed representations of mental schemas that are incorrect (Solso, MacLin & MacLin, 2008). Individuals do not intentionally fabricate their memory.
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