TPO 15 Conversation 1
Narrator:
Listen to a conversation between a student and the faculty advisor of the campus newspaper .
Student
Hi! I talked to someone on the phone a couple of weeks ago, Anna , I think it was?
Advisor
I'm Anna, the faculty advisor
Student
Oh, great! I'm Peter Murphy. You probably don't r e member me, but …
Advisor
No! No! I remember you . You're interested in working for the paper.
Student
Yeah, as a reporter .
Advisor
That's right. You're taking a jo urnalism class and you ' ve done some reporting before in high school, right?
Student
Wow, you have a good memory.
Advisor
Well we haven ' t had many students applying lately so … so anyway, you still want to do some reporting for us?
Student
Yeah, if you have room for me on the staff .
Advisor
Well we always need more reporters, but you know, we don't pay anything, right?
Student
Yeah, I know, but I huh.. . I'd like the experience. It would look good on my resume .
Advisor
Absolutely! Let's see . I think I told you that we ask prospective reporters to turn in some outlines for possible articles .
Student
Yeah, I sent them in about a week ago, but I haven't heard anything back yet, so, so I thought I'd stop by and see, but I guess you haven't looked at them yet .
Advisor
Oh, Max, the news editor. He looks a t all the submissions
Student
Oh , so he hasn't made any decision about me yet?
Advisor
Well I just got here a few minutes ago... haven't been in for a couple of days. Just give me a second to check my e-mail. Uh … here is a message from Max. Let ' s see. Well it seems you ' ve really impressed him. He says it would be wonderful if you could join our staff.
Student
Oh, great! When can I start?
Advisor
WeII, you turned in an outline on something to do with the physics department?
Student
Yeah, they're trying to come up with ways to get more students to take their introductory courses.
Advisor
Right, well , apparently, nobody else is covering that story , so he wants you to follow up on it.
Student
OK. Uh … wha t the other outline I sent in, about the proposed increase in tuition fees?
Advisor
Oh, it lo oks like we've got that covered
Student
So I am starting with an article about the physics department. I guess I'd better get to work. Do you have any advice on how I should cover the story?
Advisor
Well, Max will want to talk to you but I am sure he will tell you to find out things like why the physics department's worried about enrollment. Has the number of students been getting smaller in recent years? By how much? What kinds of plans are they considering to address this problem?
Student
Right, some of those issues are already in what I proposed .
Advisor
And you'll want to do some interviews, you know, what do the professors think of the plans , what do the students think you get the idea but …
Student
But w ai t till I talk to Max before proceeding.
Advisor
Right, he'll cover everything you need to know to be a report e r for us . Can you come back this afternoon? He will be here until 5 o'clock .
TPO 15 Lecture 1 Psychology
Narrator:
Listen to part of a lecture in a psychology class
Professor
For decades, psychologists have been looking at our ability to perform tasks while other things are going on, how we are able to keep from being distracted and what the conditi ons for good concentration are. As long ago as 1982, researchers came up with something call ed the CFQ - the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire. This questionnaire asks people to rate themselves according to how often they get distracted in different situations, like h um ….. forgetti ng to save a computer file because they had something else on their mind or missing a speed limit sign on the road. John?
John
I've lost my share of computer files, but not because I'm easily distracted. I just forget to save them.
Professor
And that's part of the problem with th e CFQ. It doesn't take other factors into account enough, like forgetfulness. Plus you really can't say you are getting objective scientific results from a subjective questionnaire where people report on themselves. S o it's no surprise that someone attempted to design an objective way to measure distraction. It's a simple computer game designed by a psychologist named, Nilli Lavie. In Lavie's game, people watch as the letters N and X appear and disappear in a certain area on the computer screen. Every time they see an N, they press one key, and every time they see an X they press another, except other letters also start appearing in the surrounding area of the screen with increasing frequency which creates a distraction and makes the task more difficult. Lavie observed that people's reaction time slowed as these distractions increased.
Student 2
Well that's not too surprising, isn't it?
Professor
No, it's not. It's the next part of the experiment that was surprising. When the difficulty really increased, when the screen filled up with letters, people got better al spotting the Xs and Ns. What do you think that happened?
John
Well, maybe when we are really concentrating, we just don't perceive irrelevant information. Maybe we just don't take it in, you know?
Professor
Yes, and that's one of the hypotheses that was proposed, that the brain simply doesn't admit the unimportant information. The second h ypothesis is that, yes, we do perceive everything, but the brain categorizes the information, and whatever is not relevant to what we are concentrating on gets treated as low priority. So Lavie did another experiment, designed to look at the ability to concentrate better in the face of increased difficulty. This time she used brain scanning equipment to monitor activity in a certain part of the brain, the area called V5, which is part of the visual cortex, the part of our brains that processes visual stimuli. V5 is the area of the visual cortex that's responsible for the sensation of movement. Once again, Lavie gave people a computer-based task to do. They have to distinguish between words in upper and lower-case letters or even harder, they had to count the number of syllables in different words. This time the distraction was a moving star f i el d in the background, you know, where H looks like you are moving through space, passing stars. Normally area of V5 would be stimulated as those moving stars are perceived and sure enough, Lavie found that during the task area of V5 was active, so people were aware of the moving star field. That means people were not blocking out the distraction.
Student
So doesn't that mean that the first hypothesis y ou mentioned w as wr o ng, the one that says we don't even perceive irrelevant information when we are concentrating?
Professor
Yes that's right, up to a point, bu t that's not all. Lavie also discovered that as she made the task more difficult，V5 became less a ctive, so that means that now people weren't really noticing the star field at all. That was quite a surprise and it approved that the second hypothesis – that we do perceive eve rything all the time but the brain categorizes distractions differently, well, that wasn't true eith er. Lavie thinks the solution lies in the brain's ability to accept or ignore visual information. She thinks its capacity is limited. It's like a highway. W hen there are too many cars, traffic is sto pp e d. No one can get on. S o when the brain is loaded to capacity, no new distractions can be perceived. Now that may be the correct conclusion for visual distractions, but more research is needed to tell us how the brain deals with, say, the distractions of solving a math problem when we are hungry or when someone is singing in the next room.
