Selective Late Selection

Selective Attention: The Debate between Early and Late Selection

Selective attention is needed because we are not always aware of our surroundings, unless we pay attention. Our behaviour can suffer when there are too many information outputs, therefore, selection must take place in order to control what information we take in, much like a bottleneck. We are testing spatial attention, and how well people can ignore distractor letters (either congruent, neutral, or incongruent). In this study, participants must quickly identify a target letter, while ignoring any distractions. There were 216 psychology students. Their response times will be measured in milliseconds. The hypothesis was that distracting stimuli would increase the time it takes

This selective prioritisation involves directing the person’s attention to a specific location in a particular space. When a space is picked, the information is further processed. Visual-spatial tasks are different compared to other forms of visual attention, which focus on an object and its entirety; the location of the object is not accounted for, whereas visual-spatial attention focuses solely on one region of space. There are two types of selection: early selection – which takes place at an early stage of perception; and late selection – selection that takes place at a late stage of

The background colour was black. The fixation cross was grey. The cross was presented at the center of the screen. There was a dot in the center of the screen, which was white. There were two target letters: ‘X’ and ‘N’, which were shown with equal probabilities. The distractor letters (‘P’, ‘N’,’X’) were shown with equal probability. The target and distractor letters were both white. 5 dots and a letter were presented at the centre of the screen, in a circle, centred on a fixation cross. The target letter was shown in one of six places and arranged in a circle. The feedback word was either ‘correct’ which was presented in green, or ‘incorrect’ which was presented in