Attention Flashcards
Why is attention important?
- Negative outcomes when it fails – e.g. education, workplace, driving
• Applied contexts – E.g. advertising, user experience
• Clinical contexts – E.g. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Anxiety,
Schizophrenia, Neglect
Suggests that attention is associated with some kind
of limitation
Processing as a bottleneck: we only have so much attention (limited capacity resource)
bottleneck: like in a traffic all of traffic has to slow down because it limits the amount of processing that can go through
Negative Outcomes
Negative outcomes when it fails: education, workplace, driving
Applied contexts: advertising, user experiences
Clinical contexts: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, schizophrenia. Understanding attention can help us understand the characteristics of these deficit disorders
Different Types of Attention
Selective attention: – Focusing attention on certain information, while ignoring other
information
• Sustained attention
– Maintaining focused attention or ‘vigilance’ – E.g. Security guard monitoring surveillance camera
• Divided attention
– E.g. multi-tasking – Another way of looking at capacity limits • Attention to different sensory modalities – E.g. sight, touch, sound, smell – Visual attention has received most examination
How can we study attention?
Reaction time experiments: Spatial cuing
Reaction time: getting them to do a task and measure how slow their responses are at different points of the task
Responses are typically slower following invalid versus valid cues
• Suggests spatial attention moved to cued location
Reaction time: Visual searches
But if target is a conjuction, RT increases with number of non-targets
• Suggests serial search is required
Disctractor Effects e.g. stroop test
Effects of attention on neural processing
• Neural response is boosted for covertly attended stimuli
(e.g., Wojciulik et al., 1998), Vuilleumier et al., 2001) • Two regions known to respond
selectively to specific stimulus
categories: – Fusiform Face Area (FFA) – Parahippocampal place area (PPA) • Central fixation
• Covert attention to faces
increased FFA response. • Covert attention to houses
increased PPA response.
Attentional Capture
• We assume attention has been “captured” by a stimulus if it slows us down when it is irrelevant
Singleton Attentional Capture Task
No distractor Distractor
Task:
Find circle
• Color “singleton” non-target increases search RTs
But colour target reduces search RT’s.
• Taken as evidence of “attentional capture” by salient stimuli