Storage and decay characteristics of nonattended auditory stimuli.

Abstract

4 Ss were individually run through 20 2-hr, sessions during which their primary task was to read a novel of their own choosing. At random intervals during the session a 1,000-cycle, j-sec. tone of low intensity occurred. At delays ranging from 0 to 10.S sec. following onset of the tone an alerting stimulus (reading lamp turned off) occurred. At the alerting stimulus S had been instructed to interrupt his reading and make a judgment as to whether the tone had occurred during the immediately preceding 10-15 sec. period. Sessions were run under a high and low condition of irrelevant noise. Detection of the signal was found to be a decay function of the delay of the alerting stimulus out to delays of 10.5 sec. 4 Ss were run in a 2nd experiment to determine whether the detection at 10.5 sec. delay represented the spontaneous rate for detection without an alerting stimulus. Significant memory at 10.5 sec. delay over the spontaneous detection rate was found. No effect of level of extraneous background noise was found. Implications for models of attention were considered.

Event-related Brain Potentials: A Tool in the Study of Human Information Processing

“…The influence which a visual non-target has on the expectancy of subsequent stimuli decays more rapidly than does the influence of a visual target. Remarkably, the relation between the decay in short-term memory in echoic and in iconic memory, which can be inferred from the existing literature (Eriksen & Johnson, 1964;Massaro, 1970;Sperling, 1960) is very similar to the decay rates implied by these data.…”

The channel capacity of visual awareness divided among multiple moving objects

“…Natural scenarios often demand attention to multiple tasks. When attention is divided this way, perception may be slower and observed objects less well resolved (Broadbent, 1958;Cherry, 1953;Eriksen & Johnson, 1964). Such results have indicated that attention has Blimited capacity.T wo general questions motivated the present study: If visual attention and perception have limited capacity, then how is this capacity distributed over multiple moving objects?…”

“…The same limitations of awareness undoubtedly underlie interactions with information technology (Levin & Baker, 2015;Varakin et al, 2004), effects of distracted driving (McCarley et al, 2004;Strayer et al, 2003), and other forms of distraction (Eriksen & Johnson, 1964;Stothart et al, 2015).…”

Constraints on Awareness, Attention, Processing, and Memory: Some Recent Investigations with Ignored Speech

“…This study adapted a technique previously used by Eriksen and Johnson (1964) to examine ignored tones. However, whereas Eriksen and Johnson relied on a single measure that indicated inattention to the tones, we used various methods of examining attention and explored the consequences of subtle differences in attentional allocation.…”