Attention Flashcards
What is attention?
Attention influences what we perceive and is therefore closely connected to perception. Attention also influences what action pattern will be used and which thought process (of several) will be granted further elaboration. In this sense, attention dictates which internal and external sensations will be processed and which responses will be executed. It is a core aspect of the cognitive system, but it is not one construct: there are several.
Our history of attention begins with something that was not called attention. How did Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) defined apperceptions?
Leibniz defined apperceptions in terms of consciousness, or the reflective knowledge of this internal state, and contrasted it with Descartes’ ‘petites perceptions’.
Leibniz argued that APPERCEPTION WAS NECESSARY IN ORDER FOR A PERCEIVED EVENT TO ENTER CONSCIOUSNESS.
As soon as a percept enters consciousness, it is changed due to already existing information in the mind’s eye. Therefore, the percept is not a true translation from the senses and thus not perceived, but apperceived.
What is Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) transcendental apperception?
Apprehension of a mental state as one’s own:
- has necessary unity since the mental state must be grounded in the continuous identity of the self
- required for a coherent consciousness and a necessary condition of the unity of experience
—> what you apprehend is uniquely to you because of your unique mental state. It follows that as you have a continous identity of the Self, your self, the mental state that relates to apperception must also be continuous and has a unity.
THE APPERCEPTION IS NEEDED FOR A COHERENT CONSCIOUSNESS and critical to have a holistic experience.
Who was Johann Herbart (1776-1841)?
Johann Herbart made an interesting extension to the ideas of Leibniz and Kant and the separation between an unconscious and conscious mind.
He even calculated the threshold of consciousness. He argues that apperception assimilates outer and inner perceptions based on their similarity with information that is already currently being apperceived. He called this the APPERCEIVING MASS.
What this means is that new information that is observed or come yo mind from our unconscious may only become apperceived and therefore in consciousness IF THEY ARE SIMILAR to the current apperceiving mass. This means that the apperceiving mass changes very slowly. Herbart does however suggest, that not all content of consciousness is apperceived. This is critical, as he essentially makes a distinction between unconscious, conscious-not-apperceived, and conscious-apperceived.
What is perception according to Johann Herbart (1776-1841) ?
Apperception is the process by which new experience is assimilated to and transformed by the residuum of past experience of an individual to form a new whole. This means that new experiences are perceived in related-to-past experiences.
How did William James (1842-1910) describe attention?
‘Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal efficiently with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.’
—> In this description, he linked attention with consciousness, effort, focused attention, and distraction. He thereby implies that attention is not only one thing.
Even though the behaviourist paradigm had its heyday during the first half of the 20th century, this does not mean that no research on unobservable concepts took place. What did Jersild (1927) find out in the field of attention?
Jersild studied the impact of switching between two tasks on performance. The results were that the performance immediately after switching to a mew task is poorer compared to when the task has been executed for some time.
—> This suggests that there is a central cost to refocusing on a new task.
What did Telford (1931) find out in the field of attention (during behaviourism) ?
Telford asked people to do two task at the same time, but manipulated the timing (SOA = stimulus onset asynchrony) between starting the two tasks. The results show that performance is poor when the two tasks are attempted at the same time and then improves until after a certain time period, referred to as the PSYCHOLOGICAL REFRACTORY PERIOD (PRP) , after which further increase in the staggering of the tasks does not leas to further increase in performance. It is as if the mind puts the second task on hold in a queue during the PRP and returns to it when the first task has been processed.
What did Stroop (1935) find out in the field of attention (during behaviourism) ?
The stroop effect is the slowing in naming the ink colour of colour words when the ink colour and the colour word do not match.
For example, if the word red is presented in red ink , people are much faster in naming the ink colour than if the word green is presented in red ink.
This is called the STROOP INTERFERENCE EFFECT and is explained by assuming that word reading is an automatic process that interferes with the non-automatic colour naming.
What lead to a major change in the way researchers communicated about attention and psychology in general after the second world war?
After the Second World War, the military was interested to understand why highly trained military personnel, such as air traffic controllers, still made errors in their job. The computer metaphor of the mind as being an information processing system took hold and several early theories of attention were all articulated using box-and-arrow diagrams. This lead to a major change in the way researchers communicated about attention and psychology in general.
What are the different types of attention ?
1) Subliminal perception
2) Attention capture
3) Selection-for-content
4) Selection-for-channel
What is subliminal perception (apperception without conscious awareness) ?
Subliminal messages keep appearing in political bulletins and products and movies directed to children. Some are blatant, while others are making use of Gestalt principles.
Although James vicary’s study to investigate subliminal messages took never place, there is other strong evidence showing that performance can be influenced by stimuli that are not consciously perceived.
One such study by Dehaene and colleagues using a numerical priming paradigm demonstrated this.
Describe the numerical priming paradigm used by Deheane and colleagues?
In this task, a mask consisting of a random bunch of letters in lower and uppercase, is followed by a prime, such as the word NINE.
This is them followed by another mask and then a target.
The target could be the digit 6.
Pps have to indicate whether the target is smaller or larger than five.
Two trials can be creates this way: -
-congruent trials in which the prime and target are both associated with the same response
-incongruent trials in where one is larger and the other smaller than 5.
The duration of the prime is 43 ms, which was shown not to be enough to detect the prime.
So in essence, the prime is invisible to the ppt.
—> Respond times are faster for congruent than incongruent trials
This holds for all combinations of notational formats of prime and target.
In the brain, the congruency effect is found in the lateralised readiness potentials, which demonstrates that the motor cortex is activated even though the person is completely unaware of the prime.
A more direct investigation, using functional MRI, showed that activation in the motor cortex correspond with the congruency effect.
This is critically important, as it suggests that motor programs can become activated and influence our overt behaviour without any conscious awareness.
If the numerical priming studies show that unconscious processing can influence behaviour, is there any behaviour that is associated with conscious awareness?
Yes.
In numerical priming, the prime had a positive effect when it was congruent with the target.
There are situations where congruent subliminal primes lead to negative effects.
.
What was called the negative compatibility effect by Eimer?
The following trial sequence:
When a prime is masked and followed by a blank, the response times are faster for incompatible than compatible primes. Eimer called this the negative compatibility effect.
He also did EEG recording and noticed that compatible trials have an early activation in the correct direction, just like in the numerical priming studies, but then this goes in the opposite direction during the interval between the prime and the target, resulting in a slowdown of response times.
