Attention 3

Question 1

What determines what we pay attention to?

Answer 1

Bottom Up - the stimulus affecting you

Top Down goals - you affecting your processes yourself e.g. looking for a taxi

Question 2

Biased Competition Theory - Desimone and Duncan (1995)

Answer 2

If the bottom up signal is strong it overrides the top down signalling so you might not be focusing on what you want

Question 3

Stimulus Driven attentional Selection - What kind of stimuli can “capture our attention?

Answer 3

Stimuli of high salience
Movement/ “abrupt onset”
Things that are relevant to us/relate to our values

Question 4

Salient Colour Singleton’s “Odd One Out” - Theeuwes 1992

Answer 4

Find circle
Colour is irrelevant to shape-based search task
Your top-down goal is to search for the shape so colour should be irrelevant
Data suggests we can’t because they take longer to find the target in the distractor condition because they get distracted by the colour singleton
Theeuwe’s interpretation: complete top-down selectivity not possible

Question 5

Theewes: Stimulus Driven Selection

Answer 5

Bottom-Up BEFORE Top-Down

First Stage:
Initial sweep across visual field, entirely bottom-up
Calculation of local salience
Attention - Location with highest local feature contrast or salience

Second Stage:
Is selected item the target? If not location inhibited
Attention then shifts to item that is next in line with respect to salience

Pre attentive analysis takes place only within attentional window, spatial cues can vary size of attentional window

Question 6

Contingent Capture

Folk and Remington (1992)

Answer 6

Attentional capture NOT stimulus driven
Attention can only be captured by stimuli relevant to our goals
Saying that nothing can get our attention based on salience alone, only captured by stimuli that are related to our goals

Result
Invalid cues produced slower RT’s
This was contingent on relation to task
colour cues capture attention when target was defined on colour
onset cues captures attention when target was defined on onset
but not vice versa

supports the idea that it’s not just salients its our goals spilling over that’s causing things to get out attention

Question 7

Bacon and Egeth (1994)

Answer 7

Search for singleton shape
e.g. spot the odd one out
therefore singleton IS relevant to top-down goals
Except the shape target is not longer a singleton
Result: colour singleton no longer interferes
Reduced local salience of singleton
Even if you’re searching for a shape you are searching for a singleton shape - may not have had the attentional setting for the shape they just wanted to find the odd one out stimulus, so that would make it relevant to their goals

Question 8

Abrupt onsets

Answer 8

Something which suddenly appears
Third viewpoint: only certain category of stimuli can capture our attention
Onsets produced attentional capture but colour singletons didn’t

Question 9

Frunceroni and Simons (2003)

Answer 9

Tried to see if looming or receding stimuli captured attention and looming captured it at the most
Probably because it was coming towards them and not moving away from them

Attentional capture beyond physical salience: sometimes things seem to attract attention because of their meaning

Familiarity/expertise can influence attention: experts in american football faster to notice changes in football related images (Werner & Thies 2010)