Individual Differences in Attention
Abstract
Air Force recruits (N = 513) viewed a long series of briefly presented, 4-word arrays. After each array, subjects received one of the four words as a probe and were asked to indicate the array location in which that word had appeared. Subjects were encouraged to distribute their attention evenly across array locations in a divided-attention condition. Different arrays presented different mixtures of novel (never repeated) and familiar (often repeated) words. Somewhat surprisingly, when a single novel word appeared with three familiar words, attention appeared to be allocated preferentially to the novel word. Subjects were encouraged to focus most of their attention on a prespecified location in a focused-attention condition and on a prespecified word in a target-localization condition. Not surprisingly, attention appeared to allocated preferentially to the prespecified locations and target words in these conditions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 18, 1988
- Accession Number
- ADA199624
Entities
People
- Kevin J. Hawley
- M. J. Farah
- William A. Johnston
Organizations
- University of Utah