Attention Flashcards
Theories of attention
bottleneck theories
selection for action theories
feautre integration theory
What are bottleneck theories?
parts of our mind have capacity limitations so we need to filter out most of the environment
e.g.face processing system only works on sysngle faces, need to select 1
early vs late selection theories
does filtering happen early on (sensory systems)
does it occur later (filtering based on semantics?)
selection for action theories
problem is not that mental capacity is too small but that it is too large
processing everything would lead to interference between them and make it hard to repsond approriately to specific stimuli
putting more things in your mind makes tasks and decisions harder
feature integration theory
we need attention to bind together multiple features of a stimulus
without attention, many features can make it into working memory but they are jumbled up
Anne Treisman
Feature integration theory study Anne Treisman and Gelade (1980)
Ns and Os scattered on a screen, red and green. Participants have to look for the O of a particular color.
Screen showed for one second or less, then numbers came on in the placement of the letters.
Participant has to choose number of where the O of the chosen color was.
Relatively easy to do, doesn’t require much attention
illusory conjunctions
for unattended shapes, people will report incorrect feature combinations
Treisman a& Schmidt
e.g “large unfilled red circle”
Example 2 of illusory conjunctions
for unattended shapes, people will report incorrect feature com- binations even if tasks are not quick.
Crossword puzzle: try to find the word dog in it, when all of the letters within the puzzle are D, O, and G
hard to find word in crossword puzzle
Filtering v. Attentuation
Treisman Theory
Unattended features are not fully filtered out, just attenuated
ex: Dichotic listening experiments
Dichotic listening experiments
Left Ear: mice 5 chese
right ear: 3 eat 4
Subjects report “mice eat cheese”
Gray and Wedderburn
Change Blindness
scope of our attention is very limited
we dramatically overestimate how much information we are attending to in the world
failure of our metacognition
Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin (1998) Paying Attention: The “Door” Study
Asking for directions. People carrying a large art piece pass by in the middle. Person asking for direction swaps with another person. Person giving directions does not notice the change.
external attention
external attention
what additional filters can we use?
- modality specific (visual vs auditory) attention
- spatial (visual or auditory) attention
- visual feature attentions (colors, shapes
- visual object attention (familiar face)
- auditory feature attention
taxonomy of attention
internal attention: goal oriented
external attention: stimulus driven
internal attention
task rules: takes time to mentally redirect attention to a new task
LTM: selecting relevant memories and attentuating related but irrelevant ones
working memory: choosing which information to maintain and which to discard
