ATTENTION:
-Lab Stroop Effect’s Theory:
During the experiment, it was more difficult to indicate the color ink that the word was shown in when the word itself indicated a non-corresponding color. This is the Stroop Effect: the finding that people identify the color of a word more slowly when color and word are incongruent (for example, the word BLUE printed in a red color) than when color and word are congruent (for example the word BLUE printed in blue).
But why is identifying the color of a word in the incongruent conditions difficult? Recognizing words has become an automatic process; even without deliberately attending to the word, we can't help but recognize the meaning of the color words (called semantic activation). This sets up a competition between two responses - the color that you want to name, and the automatic activation of the color word. Because of this interference, naming the color in which the word is printed takes longer. Interference is asymmetrical - the color in which a word appears does not lengthen response time to reading the words themselves.

-Lab Selective Attention: In this experiment you were first confronted with the task of remembering words without knowing what kind of words would be presented. In the second experiment, you were given a cue as to what kind of words to expect. | | Based on previous research on the capacity of working of memory, we would expect you to remember 5 to 9 words from the first experiment. If you are like most people, you will have remembered more items from the second list than the first. Furthermore, you are likely only to have remembered first names (12 in total), but none of the last names. Why? Maybe a silly question because you were given the assignment to focues on the first names. But there is more to it. While looking at the second list you had to decide for every word you looked at if it was a first name or not. Deciding whether or not the word is a first name means that you have focused your attention on that word, after which you decided whether it was a first name or not. | | But we see something else which is an extremely interesting phenomenon to psychologists (but also to non-psychologists). From the second list almost no other words than the first names were remembered. How is that possible? Maybe a silly question because you were given the assignment to focues on the first names. But there is more to it. While looking at the second list you had to decide for every word you looked at if it was a first name or not. Deciding wether or not the word is a first name means that the word has been under your attention for a while, after which you decided if it was a first name or not. | | Initial theories of selective attention in the 1950s and 1960s focused on bottom-up processing of stimuli, and claimed that our attention is driven by aspects of a stimulus itself. Donald Broadbent (1958), for example, claimed that only one stimulus at a time could get through for recognition, because there was a filter or attentional bottleneck that only permitted a limited amount of information at a time. However, other attention researchers, such as Anne Treisman, Peter Lindsay, and Donald Norman, claimed that information we already had stored in memory could influence our attentional mechanisms; this is known as top-down processing. In one experiment, Treisman asked French & English bilingual subjects to put on headphones, and to repeat a message heard in, say, their LEFT ear, but to ignore the message in their right ear. She then played a tape recording of a book in English to the LEFT ear. Initially, subjects had no trouble ignoring their right ear. After so many seconds, Treisman then had the right ear message switch to a reading of the same book, but in French. Her subjects reported noticing that the right ear message was the same as the left, even though they were supposed to be ignoring it, and it was in a different language. Treisman explained that the message in the LEFT ear acted as a prompt that allowed subjects to attend to the right ear (or unattended) message. This is an example of top-down processing. |

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-Lab Emotional Stroop Theory:
In the original Stroop task, a subject is asked to name the color of ink in which a color word is printed. In the neutral condition e.g. the word RED is printed in red ink. When the word RED is printed in green ink, this is the interference condition. It takes subjects longer to name the color ink in the interference condition than in the neutral condition. Why? The automatic process of reading the word generates a mental representation of that color (RED), which interferes or competes with the naming of the actual color ink (green). No such competition exists in the neutral condition where the color word and ink are the same.

The Emotional Stroop task is based on the same reasoning. Instead of color-words, the items used in this variant are either emotional (mostly threatening) or neutral words. Most people are slower to name the ink color of the emotional words compared to neutral words. This is especially true of patients with anxiety-disorders. For example, when a patient with panic disorder is confronted with the word 'heart attack,' they take longer to name the color ink than when a non-threatening word (e.g., "autumn") is presented.
Many researchers believe that the Emotional Stroop is due to an attentional bias. Patients with anxiety disorders tend to pay extra attention to threatening information but relatively little attention to neutral information. Because of this preoccupation with anxiety-related stimuli, they notice the presence of anxiety-related stimuli more quickly, which leads to longer response times to naming the color ink. |
Memory:

-Lab Iconic Memory Theory: Recall that in the Full Report experiment, people can recall an average of 4.5 items from the entire matrix. However, when asked to report only one row, many people can remember all 3 of the letters in that row. What this suggests is that they initially perceived all 9 items in the matrix, but could not retain this knowledge because it began to fade as soon as the matrix disappeared. Sperling later claimed that people's perceptual span consists of all items in one's visual field. The second conclusion Sperling drew was that information in iconic memory lasts only around 1/3 of a second. Letters perceived at a single glance are stored for just a few hundred milliseconds, after which they disappear from sensory memory. Sperling concluded this from the fact that subjects were able to reproduce almost all of the letters in one row of a matrix if the signal as to which row to report appeared immediately after the stimulus disappeared. However, the longer the delay between the stimulus and the partial report cue, the less subjects recalled from their icon. After 1/3 of a second, performance in the Partial Report experiment equaled the 4.5 items from the Full Report experiment. Other studies have confirmed that the icon in iconic memory lasts about 300 milliseconds (about 1/3 of a second).

-Lab Memory Span Theory:
The data you've just received from this experiment shows the size of your memory span. It is likely that the size lies between 5 and 9. After a review of many experiments on short-term memory, George Miller concluded from memory research that our short-term memory has a capacity of "seven plus or minus two" (which he referred to as "the Magic Number 7"). In other words, we can hold a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 9 items in our short-term memory, whereas the items can be digits, letters, or words.

One way to potentially increase the number of items we can remember is to merge them into meaningful units. This strategy is called chunking. Let us illustrate this with an example. Read this row of letters out loud, pausing at every hyphen. Then try to remember the letters in order. Because the chunks are now meaningful and familiar to you, your memory span seems to have "expanded" to 17 letters. This isn't really the case; after all you are remembering only 4 acronyms for familiar concepts (UFOs), and the 4 chunks are clearly within the range of short-term memory.
DeGroot determined in 1965 that chess masters were able to meaningfully chunk chess pieces presented visually, and that this led them to put the chess pieces back on the board more accurately than chess novices.

-Lab Encoding Specificity Theory:
Words from strongly associated word pairs in the input stage (such as wasp and sting), are best recognized when they are in the company of the same strongly associated word in the recognition stage (e.g., provision of "sting" helps you remember "wasp"). This is better than when the target word "wasp" is paired with another highly associated word ("bee") that had not been seen in the encoding phase. Finally, you will find the same pattern for words from weakly associated word pairs lead to better memory for one of the words in the pair than does a strongly associated cue that was not encoded originally. For example, if you see "pool-ravine" during the encoding portion of the experiment, "pool" will still serve as a better memory cue for "ravine" than will "abyss" (which is more strongly associated with ravine).

-Lab Recalling Info Theory:
You probably did not succeed in recalling the complete first set of words. The size of short term memory is limited (the workings of short term memory are considered in detail in the Sternberg search). The words you could not remember, where had they gone? In the second part of the task, you were shown words that were associated with those you had failed to recall during the first part (e.g., the word “planet” may have helped you remember “Jupiter”). This may have triggered your memory for the supposedly “forgotten” words. This suggests that those words remained in memory, but could not be retrieved until they were activated by the associated clues. This raises the question about whether information really disappears from memory at all, or whether we simply have trouble retrieving some kinds of knowledge. Why are some kinds of information harder to retrieve than others? Recalling knowledge is dependent on our being able to minimize interference with other, similar pieces of information. For example, you may not be able to report the exact spot in which you parked when you went to your favorite restaurant 3 weeks ago. However, most of us can remember where we were, and what we were doing when we heard about the 9/11 bombings of the New York City World Trade Center. What makes the latter event, which happened years ago, so much easier to recall than our restaurant parking place 3 weeks ago? Distinctiveness makes it easy to retrieve details of that event and where we were at the time. However, a single visit to our favorite restaurant blurs with every other, so that we have trouble retrieving the details of any single trip. The information about our parking space may be stored mentally, but we have trouble separating it from all the other places we’ve parked at that particular restaurant. Many cognitive psychologists believe that when something slips your mind, you may not really have forgotten the information, but that other similar information is interfering with the fact you are trying to remember.