ATTENTION Flashcards
“Attention is the taking possession of the mind, in
clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem
several simultaneously possible objects or trains of
thoughts… it implies withdrawal from some things in
order to deal effectively with others.”
William James
We select and process a limited amount of
information; captured by our senses, our stored
memories and other cognitive processes.
Attention
Ability to attend a field of stimulation over a
prolonged period
•
Watchfully waits to detect a signal stimulus that
may appear at an unknown time
•
Needed in setting in which a given stimulus
occurs rarely but requires immediate attention as
soon it occurs.
VIGILANCE
-people pick out
the important stimuli embedded in a wealth of
irrelevant, distracting stimuli.
-Often used to measure sensitivity to target’s
presence.
Signal Detection
Includes both conscious and unconscious
processes.
Attention
allows us to use our limited mental
resources judiciously. We can focus more on the
stimuli that interest us by focusing less on
outside stimuli and inner stimuli that are not of
interest to us
Attention
4 MAIN FUNCTIONS
(ATTENTION)
Signal detection and Vigilance
Search
Selective Attention
Divided Attention
•
Involves using our attentioinal resources to
actively and often skillfully seek out a target.
•
Scan of the environment for particular features -
actively looking for something when you are not
sure where it will appear.
Search
-2 Different Kinds of Searches-
Feature search
Conjunction search
Used in signal detection theory
SIGNAL DETECTION MATRIX
4 possible outcomes of signal detection
Hits - “true positives”
False alarms- “false positives”
Misses-“false negatives”
Correct rejections -“true negatives”
•
Anne Treisman (1986)
• Nobel laureates David Hubel and Torsten
Wiesel (1979)
•
explains why it is relatively easy to conduct
feature searches and relatively difficult to
conduct conjunction searches
Feature Integration Theory (FIT)
2 Stages when we perceive objects
- color and size
- Connecting 2 or more features with some
“mental glue”
The more similar target and distracter are, the
more difficult it is to find the target.
•
The difficulty of search tasks depends on how
different distracters are from each other. But it
does not depend on the number of features to be
integrated.
Similarity Theory
True or False. THEORIES OF DIVIDED ATTENTION
- One model suggests that one single pool of
attentional resources can be divided freely. - Another model suggests multiple sources of
attention are available, one for each modality.
True
Initial performance was
poor for the two tasks when the tasks had to be
performed at the same time (enough practice,
participants improved)
Dual-Task Paradigm
Dichotic Presentation
Attended inputs > 👱< Unattended inputs
•
Collin Cherry (1953)
•
Cocktail Party Problem - tracking one
conversation while distracted by other
conversation
•
He devised a task known as shadowing -
listening to two different messages.
•
“Dichotic Presentation” - he presented a separate
message to each ear.
Selective Attention
FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE OUR
ABILITY TO PAY ATTENTION
- anxiety
- arousal
- task difficulty
- skills
Being “prepared” to attend to some incoming event,
and maintaining this attention.
Alerting
The selection of stimuli to attend to.
-This kind of attention is needed when we perform a
visual search
Orienting
- includes processes for monitoring and resolving
conflicts that arise among internal process
Executive attention
WHEN OUR
ATTENTION FAILS US
-Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
-Change blindness/inattentional blindness
Three primary symptoms of
ADHD are:
Inattention
Hyperactivity
Impulsiveness
There are three main types of ADHD, depending on
which symptoms are predominant:
• Hyperactive-impulsive
•
Inattentive
•
Combination of hyperactive-impulsive and
inattentive behavior
attentional
dysfunction in which participants ignore the
half of their visual field that is contralateral to
(on
the opposite side of) the hemisphere of the
brain that has a lesion.
SPATIAL NEGLECT
Is an inability to detect changes in objects or
scenes that are being viewed.
Change blindness
Is a phenomenon in
which people are not able to see things that are
actually there.
INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS
• Require intentional effort.
•
Require full conscious awareness
•
Consume many attentional resources
•
Performed serially
•
Relatively time-consuming execution, as compared with
automatic processes.
•
Usually difficult tasks
Controlled processes
they are performed without conscious awareness.
•
require little or no intention or effort
•
multiple automatic processes may occur at once, or
atleast quickly, and in no particular sequence.
Automatic processes
which is named after John Ridley Stroop.
•
In 1935, Stroop observed a peculiar phenomenon of
visual selective attention.
•
It demonstrates the psychological
difficulty in selectively attending to the color of the ink
and trying to ignore the word that is printed with the ink
of that color.
was proposed by Gordon Logan. He suggested that
automatization occurs because we gradually accumulate
knowledge about specific responses to specific stimuli.
Instance Theory
MISTAKES WE MAKE IN
AUTOMATIC PROCESSES
Human errors shows that error can be classified as either as______
Mistakes and error
Type of Errors
•
Capture errors
•
Omissions
•
Perseverations
•
Description Errors
•
Data-driven errors
•
Associative-activation errors
•
Loss-of-activation errors
Both feeling of awareness and the content of
awareness, which may be under the focus of
attention under the focus of att
CONSCIOUSNESS
Information that is available for cognitive
processing but that currently lies outside
conscious awareness exists at the preconscious
level of awareness.
PRECONSCIOUS
PROCESSING
traces of visual perceptual ability in blind areas.
•
when forced to guess about a stimulus in the
“blind region”, they correctly guess locations and
orientation of objects at above chance levels.
Blindsight
