attention - what is it?

Question 1

why is attention important?

Answer 1

• Negative outcomes when it fails e.g., education, workplace, driving
  
  • Applied contexts e.g., advertising, user experience
  • Clinical contexts e.g., ADHD, anxiety, schizophrenia, neglect
  • We receive too much input
  • We cant look at, listen to, feel, and think about everything at once.
  • We cant look at, listen to, feel, and think about everything at once - why not?
  • Suggests that attention is associated with some kind of limitation
  • Attention as a limited capacity resource
  • Or processing “bottleneck”
  • What is limited? Where in processing is this bottleneck?

Question 2

different types of attention

Answer 2

• 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 - keeping selection attention for an extended period of time
  • Divided attention - another way of looking at capacity limits e.g,, multi-tasking
  • Attention to different sensory modalities - visual attention has received most examination e.g., sight, touch, sound, smell

Question 3

how can we study attention?

Answer 3

• Visual attention has been studied through eye movements - to see what they are looking at - can use eye tracking equipment
  
  • But we don’t always look at what we attend
  • How can we study covert spatial attention?
  • Reaction time (RT) experiments - assume attention takes time to move around

Question 4

reaction time experiments - spatial cuing

Answer 4

• Different trials
  
  • Some have valid cues and some have invalid cues
  • People take longer if they are following invalid cues
  • Endogenous cues - instructs a participant in a task to direct attention to a particular location but does not automatically draw attention to that location - initiates a voluntary movement of attention
  • Exogenous cues - the onset of a stimulus in the peripheral visual field, that draws attention automatically to the location of the stimulus.

Question 5

spatial cuing

Answer 5

• responses are typically slower following invalid versus valid cues
• suggests spatial attention moved to cued location
  
  • This works with both endogenous cues and exogenous cues
• Covert spatial attention can be both voluntary and involuntary

Question 6

reaction time experiments - visual search

Answer 6

• if the target “pops out”, increasing non-targets doesn’t affect RT
• but if target is a conjunction, RT increases with number of non-target
• suggests serial search is required

Question 7

reaction time experiments - distractor effects

Answer 7

• Task examples - stroop, flanker
  
  • We assume attention has been distracted by a stimulus if it slows down when it is irrelevant
  • Responses typically slower when distractors are incongruent compared to congruent or neutral
  • Suggests even spatially separated distractors cannot be ignored.

Question 8

reaction time experiments - attentional capture

Answer 8

• we assume attention has been “captured” by a stimulus if it slows us down when it is irrelevant.
• or speeds up our responses when it is the target
• colour “singleton” target reduces search RTs
• taken as evidence of “attentional capture” by salient stimuli

Question 9

error and self-report measures

Answer 9

• Often used to test affects of attention on awareness
  
  • E.g., change blindness
  • Also subjective phenomena such as mind-wandering
  • People who report more mind-wandering also show more RT interference on measures of distraction and more errors on sustained attention tasks.

Question 10

effects of attention on neural processing

Answer 10

• 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.