A Review Of Sex And Moodality Effect In Divided Attention Task

DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY
UNIVERSITY OF GHANA
LEGON

PSYC 449: PRACTICALS IN COGNITION 2016/2017.
ID Number: 10418127
TITLE OF STUDY: Sex and modality effects in divided attention task
Instructor: Dr. B. Amponsah

Title: Sex and modality effect in divided attention task
ABSTRACT
There have been several experiments conducted with regard to the divided attention task. This experiment was conducted in similar fashion as the others with a sample of 180 participants selected randomly from a population of level 400 psychology students of Legon campus and City campus. The design was an Independent group experimental design (between-subject) with 3 independent randomized groups performing 3 different tasks. At the end of the data analysis it was

Anderson (2004) said that, “attention is the allocation of limited processing resources”. Most psychologist talk of the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche to be the first to discuss attention in his work “The search after truth”. Fields of psychology such as cognitive and neuropsychology continue to do more research on attention trying to fully understand the process. According Matlin (2013) attention can be shifted, selective and divided which helps in multitasking but she noted that people tend to make mistakes or perform slower when they try to multitask. Divided attention is the phenomenon responsible for multitasking. In a scenario such as trying to text whiles driving, attention is divided in order for the person to perform both task simultaneously. This research investigated divided attention along different modalities and also examine if there are difference among genders when it comes to divided

According to Pashler (1994) the most common theories about dual-task situations are the bottleneck, capacity sharing and cross talk theories. There are two categories of the bottleneck model which are the early selection model and the late selection model. The Broadbent filter theory is one of the bottleneck theories. According to Friedenburg and Silverman (2012), Broadbent used the split-scan experiment to explain his paradigm that information that is unattended to will be blocked completely. Broadbent’s filter theory basically explains that there is limited capacity for attention therefore a selective filter is needed to select the needed sensory stimuli based on physical characteristics such as pitch and tone to making focusing possible. Broadbent also used the dichotic listening test to explain his paradigm. This is where participants were made to shadow a message being played to them in one ear while a different message was being played in the other ear and most of them could not tell the content of the message played in that ear (Moray, 1995). Triesman did further research and propounded the attenuation theory which had a better explanation compared to Broadbent’s “all or none” understanding. According to Triesman (1969) there is an attenuator instead of a filter that reduces the volume of the unattended information which makes it possible for people to attend to stimuli