In 2003, Paul E. Downing, David Bray, Jack Rogers, an Claire Childs published an article revealing their finding regarding the cognitive process of selective attention. Their experiment consisted of two parts and functioned to discover whether or not awareness places a priority on unanticipated human body stimuli while being preoccupied with a task. Moreover, the body stimuli were not relevant to the task being completed, that task being judging whether the horizontal line or vertical line of a cross was longer.
The experiment consisted of two parts; the first was designed to indicate whether an attentional preference existed, and whether or not the emphasis would be put on stick figures of bodies, or silhouettes of hands, bodies and objects. …show more content…
Subsequently, an initiation fixation point was presented for 1507 milliseconds (ms), followed by the cross with or without the critical stimulus for 200 ms, and lastly a pattern mask 507 ms (Downing et al. 2003). When the critical stimulus appeared, the placement was 45o from the middle of the cross and the quadrant where it appeared was randomly decided. The task given consisted of determining which line of the cross was longer and pressing the according key (right arrow for the horizontal line, up arrow for vertical line). On trials 4 there was no warning of the critical stimulus, trial 7 explicitly asked participants to watch for the critical stimuli and complete the line task, finally, prior to trial 8, they were instructed to only pay attention to the critical stimuli. After the critical trials, participants were immediately questioned on whether they saw any other item other than the cross or mask. If they answered yes, they were then asked to identify the stimulus from a selection presented on paper. The selections had two randomly selected items and the correct …show more content…
This damage causes attention to prefer the right visual field, and leave stimulus presented in the left visual field undetected, hence visual extinction and why they were chosen for the study. Each participant was presented 24 gray-scale whole-body pictures; 8 invoked fearful body expressions, 8 with happy expressions, and 8 showing emotional neutrality with meaningful body actions (Tamietto et al. 2007). Prior to each photo, participants stared at a fixation point for 500 ms. The three types of photos were either individually shown or randomly combined, either appearing solely in the left visual field (LVF), right visual field, or unilaterally. To determine which stimulus was detected first, researchers asked the participants to say the location of where they saw the stimuli, omitting to ask the nature of the
The experiment consisted of two parts; the first was designed to indicate whether an attentional preference existed, and whether or not the emphasis would be put on stick figures of bodies, or silhouettes of hands, bodies and objects. …show more content…
Subsequently, an initiation fixation point was presented for 1507 milliseconds (ms), followed by the cross with or without the critical stimulus for 200 ms, and lastly a pattern mask 507 ms (Downing et al. 2003). When the critical stimulus appeared, the placement was 45o from the middle of the cross and the quadrant where it appeared was randomly decided. The task given consisted of determining which line of the cross was longer and pressing the according key (right arrow for the horizontal line, up arrow for vertical line). On trials 4 there was no warning of the critical stimulus, trial 7 explicitly asked participants to watch for the critical stimuli and complete the line task, finally, prior to trial 8, they were instructed to only pay attention to the critical stimuli. After the critical trials, participants were immediately questioned on whether they saw any other item other than the cross or mask. If they answered yes, they were then asked to identify the stimulus from a selection presented on paper. The selections had two randomly selected items and the correct …show more content…
This damage causes attention to prefer the right visual field, and leave stimulus presented in the left visual field undetected, hence visual extinction and why they were chosen for the study. Each participant was presented 24 gray-scale whole-body pictures; 8 invoked fearful body expressions, 8 with happy expressions, and 8 showing emotional neutrality with meaningful body actions (Tamietto et al. 2007). Prior to each photo, participants stared at a fixation point for 500 ms. The three types of photos were either individually shown or randomly combined, either appearing solely in the left visual field (LVF), right visual field, or unilaterally. To determine which stimulus was detected first, researchers asked the participants to say the location of where they saw the stimuli, omitting to ask the nature of the