Attention and Perception Lab Essay

Attention and Perception Lab
Natalie Sampat
100278868
Psychology 2385
Section L10
Introduction
1. A stroop task is when you demonstrate a task that involves a competing response. With the competing response present, also considered as a distraction, it slows down reaction time. A stroop task would involve congruent and incongruent stimuli’s. Congruent stimuli’s is when both stimuli’s match each other. For example, in the celebrity stroop task the picture and name on the card were matching. Incongruent stimuli’s, both stimuli’s would not match each other. For example, in the celebrity stroop task the name and picture on the card did not match. You then had to set the card in its correct spot. The non-matching cards (incongruent stimuli) made it much more complicated than when the names matched the picture on the card (congruent stimuli). Every task involving a distraction or divided attention cannot be considered a stroop task because you would need an incongruent and congruent stimulus involved. You would also have to be able to measure reaction time and the amount of errors to be able to conclude the differences and difficulty of the task. A stroop task involves an interference that makes the task harder to respond to the target rather than an interference that you could possibly ignore.

2. A stroop task is efficient to study attention or perception because you can measure the reaction time of the task and compare it to other participant’s results. Comparing the data of an incongruent and congruent stimulus would show the difference in reaction time when interference in perception is involved and the interference was not involved. Perception could be measured by the errors because it would represent what the brain is having difficulty with perceiving when distractions are present. It would also show how much attention is being paid to the task by the amount of errors. Attention can be studied and demonstrate a high load and a low load task.

3. The independent variables in the celebrity stroop task are the congruent cards with matching names and pictures, and incongruent cards with non-matching names and pictures. The dependent variable was the reaction time and amount of errors.

4. The experimental controls are the incongruent cards and the congruent cards. Each category of cards helped improve the quality of results because it represented the response time of either incongruent cards or congruent cards. It showed the difference between when interferences are involved and when interferences are not involved. The errors were able to help us decide how much harder a task was when the interference was present or not. Also, the reaction time measured how long it took to do a task with interferences present or not. The longer it took to do a task would represent it was more complicated than the other task.

Results

Mean for errors sorting by faces in congruent condition
0
Mean for errors sorting by labels in congruent condition
0
Mean for errors sorting by faces in incongruent condition
0.22 errors
Mean for errors sorting by labels in incongruent condition
0.32
There were no errors in sorting congruent cards by faces. There were also no errors in sorting congruent cards by label. There were .22 errors when sorting incongruent cards by faces and .32 errors in sorting incongruent cards by labels. Overall, errors occurred in the incongruent conditions and no errors occurred in the congruent conditions.

Mean for sorting time by faces in incongruent condition
46.9 seconds
Mean for sorting time by labels in incongruent condition
60.7 seconds
Mean for sorting time by faces in congruent condition
37.6 seconds
Mean for sorting time by labels in congruent condition
44.8 seconds
Sorting congruent cards by faces on average took 37.6 seconds. Sorting congruent cards by labels on average took 44.8 seconds. Sorting incongruent cards by faces on average took 46.9 seconds. Sorting incongruent cards by labels on average took 60.7 seconds.

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