Lab Exercise with Quizzing

Read the materials, click on the lab exercise links and take the quizzes. Please note these will open in a new window.

Lab Exercise 1: Dual Task Experiment

This is a resource intended to assist students with their mastery and appreciation for the field of cognitive psychology. Perform the divided attention task. Are there any instances in everyday life when you engage in similar tasks? Why is this more difficult than the focused attention task?

Follow-Up Quiz

1. What happens to your performance when you perform a dual-task as opposed to a single-task?

  1. increase in performance
  2. increase in asymptote
  3. decrease
  4. increase in performance and increase in asymptote

Ans: C

2. What does this experiment tell us about the capacity of attention?

  1. It is limitless.
  2. There is a limit to the cognitive resources we can allocate to the task.
  3. We can increase the threshold of our cognitive resources with training.
  4. Our brain can allocate an equal amount of resources to each task.

Ans: B

3. Multi-tasking is the best way to get your work done according to psychologists.

  1. True
  2. False

Ans: F

 

Lab Exercise 2: Visual Search Demonstration

This demonstration enables you to explore a few different visual search tasks. Perform the visual search task. Which search is easy and which is more difficult? Have you observed when you made mistakes and why? What does this exercise tell us about the role of attention in feature binding?

Follow-Up Quiz

1. What do these visual search tasks demonstrate about attention?

  1. the ability to filter information
  2. the capacity of attention
  3. the incompatibilities that tax attention
  4. the feature-binding ability of attention

Ans: D

2. What part(s) of the brain might be activated during these tasks?

  1. occipital cortex
  2. parietal cortex
  3. visual cortex
  4. all of these

Ans: D

3. The Visual Search experiment only works successfully with shape stimuli.

  1. True
  2. False

Ans: F

 

Lab Exercise 3: Flanker Compatibility Task

This provides demos in perception, attention, and memory. Perform the flanker compatibility task and discuss their results. What conditions were the easiest and why? What does this task reveal about the nature of our attention?

Follow-Up Quiz

1. In the flanker task, which part of the task can most rely on automatic processing?

  1. processing the direction of the middle arrow
  2. ignoring the arrows showing the opposite direction from the middle arrow
  3. pressing the correct arrow key with your finger
  4. none of these

Ans: A

2. In the flanker task, which part of the task must rely most on controlled processing?

  1. processing the direction of the middle arrow
  2. ignoring the arrows showing the opposite direction from the middle arrow
  3. pressing the correct arrow key with your finger
  4. none of these

Ans: B

3. The flanker task requires one to selectively attend to ______.

  1. the direction of the middle arrow
  2. the direction of the arrows around the middle arrow
  3. the arrows on the keyboard
  4. pressing the correct middle arrow keys with your finger

Ans: A