CH. 5. Paying Attention

Question 1

Unilateral Neglect Syndrome

Answer 1

UNILATERAL NEGLECT SYNDROME – Patients with this syndrome ignore all inputs coming from one side of the body.

• EX: The patient will eat food from only one side of the plate, wash only half of his or her face, and fail to locate sought-for objects if they’re on the neglected side
• This pattern is generally the result of damage to the parietal cortex.
  
  • This syndrome typically results from damage to the right parietal lobe, and so the neglect is for the left side of space.

Question 2

Selective Attention

Answer 2

SELECTIVE ATTENTION – the skill through which a person focuses on one input or one task while ignoring other stimuli that are also on the scene.

• WILLIAM JAMES (1842-1910) – a historical giant of the field of psychology – defined attention in 1890.

DICHOTIC LISTENING – the process of receiving DIFFERENT auditory messages presented simultaneously to each ear.

• Listeners experience two streams of sound, each localized at the ear to which it is presented, and are able to focus on the message from one ear while ignoring the message from the other ear.
• ATTENDED CHANNEL – refers to the auditory message that is being ATTENDED to (Paid attention to) while ignoring the message in the other ear – the UNATTENDED CHANNEL.
  
  • SHADOWING: Participants were required to repeat back what they were hearing, word for word,
    
    • Used to make sure participants are paying attention to the ATTENDED CHANNEL
• UNATTENDED CHANNEL – refers to the auditory message that is being IGNORED while attending to the message in the other ear – the ATTENDED CHANNEL.​
  
  • Physical attributes (e.g. Male or female voice) of the unattended channel are heard, even though participants are generally clueless about the unattended channel’s semantic content.
    
    • “INVISIBLE GORILLA” video – Video where a gorilla is missed because everyone is paying attention to something else.
• People are not completely oblivious to the unattended channel
  
  • People tend to hear their own NAME even on UNATTENDED CHANNELS because the name detector is highly primed – even if they heard nothing else.
    
    • In fact, words with some personal importance are often noticed – again, due to priming associated with frequency or recency.

INHIBITING DISTRACTOR – Your mind is somehow able to block out DISTRACTORS, messages that are NOT on the ATTENDED CHANNEL.

• You somehow block the processing of the inputs you’re not interested in even though you hear them.
• People erect a FILTER that shields them from potential distractors.
  
  • Desired information (the attended channel) is not filtered out and so goes on to receive further processing.
  • That’s because you not only inhibit the processing of distractors, you also promote the processing of desired stimuli.

THE COCKTAIL EFFECT – There you are at a party, deep in conversation. Other conversations are going on, but somehow you’re able to “tune them out.” All you hear is the single conversation you’re attending to, plus a buzz of background noise. But now imagine that someone a few steps away from you mentions the name of a close friend of yours. Your attention is immediately caught, and you find yourself listening to that other conversation and (momentarily) oblivious to the conversation you had been engaged in.

INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS – a pattern in which people fail to see a prominent stimulus, even though they’re staring straight at it.

• EX: looking for the ketchup in the refrigerator.
• fixated on (i.e., pointed their eyes at) a mark in the center of the computer screen — a fixation target

INATTENTIONAL DEAFNESS – People fail to hear prominent stimuli if they aren’t expecting them.

INATTENTIONAL NUMBNESS – participants fail to feel stimuli if the inputs are unexpected.

• Do they really NOT see, hear, or feel the stimuli?
  
  • Researchers propose that participants in these experiments did see (or hear or feel) the targets but, a moment later, couldn’t remember what they’d just experienced – meaning they were sensed, but not processed beyond a point that would have brought them to consciousness.
• Perception requires more than “merely” having a stimulus in front of your eyes. Perception requires some work.

CHANGE BLINDNESS – observers’ inability to detect changes in scenes they’re looking directly at.

EARLY VERSUS LATE SELECTION – people are often oblivious to stimuli directly in front of their eyes and there are two ways to think about these results.

• LATE SELECTION HYPOTHESIS: all inputs receive relatively complete analysis, and selection occurs after the analysis is finished – perceived but filtered.
  
  • This reflects limits on PERCEPTION so that participants literally don’t see (or hear) these stimuli.
  • ​On the one side, there are cases in which people seem unaware of distractors but are influenced by them anyway so that the (apparently unnoticed) distractors guide the interpretation of the attended stimuli
    
    • This seems to be a case of LATE SELECTION: The distractors are perceived (so that they do have an influence) but are selected out before they make it to consciousness.
• EARLY SELECTION HYPOTHESIS: the attended input is privileged from the start so that the unattended input receives little analysis and therefore is never perceived.
  
  • ​This reflects limits on MEMORY so that participants do see (or hear) the stimuli but immediately forget what they’ve just experienced.
  • We can also find evidence for EARLY SELECTION, with attended inputs being privileged from the start and distractor stimuli falling out of the stream of processing at a very early stage – before it makes it to consciousness.
• So each hypothesis captures part of the truth.
• Attention can also influence activity levels in the lateral geniculate nucleus or LGN
  
  • In this case, attention is changing the flow of signals within the nervous system even before the signals reach the brain.

Question 3

Selection via Priming

Answer 3

SELECTION VIA PRIMING – Why don’t participants notice the shapes in the inattentional blindness studies? The answer lies in the fact that they don’t expect any stimulus to appear, so they have no reason to prepare for any stimulus.

• As a result, when the stimulus is presented, it falls on unprepared (unprimed, unresponsive) detectors. The detectors, therefore, don’t respond to the stimulus, so the participants end up not perceiving it.

TWO TYPES OF PRIMING – The idea before us, in short, has three elements.

• First, perception is vastly facilitated by the priming of relevant detectors.
• Second, the priming is sometimes STIMULUS-DRIVEN — that is, produced by the stimuli you’ve encountered (recently or frequently) in the past. This is known as:
  
  • REPETITION PRIMING – priming produced by a prior encounter with the stimulus.
    
    • This type of priming takes no effort on your part and requires no resources, and it’s this sort of priming that enables you to hear your name on the unattended channel.
• Third, Priming is EXPECTATION-DRIVEN and under your control. In this form of priming, you deliberately prime detectors for inputs you think are upcoming, so that you’re ready for those inputs when they arrive.
  
  • You don’t do this priming for inputs you have no interest in, and you can’t do this priming for inputs you can’t anticipate.

RESPONSE TIMES (RT) – The quickness that a person reacts to a stimulus – used in experiments to measure minute differences in cognition. There are 3 conditions relavant here:

• Neutral – warning provided NO reliable priming for what was to come.
• Primed – warning provided RELIABLE priming for what was to come.
• Misled – warning provided DECEPTION for what was to come.
  
  • RTs were reliably faster in the primed condition than in the neutral condition
  • Detectors can be primed by mere exposure to a stimulus, even in the absence of expectations, and so this priming is truly stimulus-based.
  • Priming the “wrong” detector takes nothing away from the other detectors — including the detectors actually needed for that trial.
    
    • Each of the various detectors works independently of the others, and so priming one detector obviously influences the functioning of that specific detector but neither helps nor hinders the other detectors.
• However, the HIGH-VALIDITY PRIMES (primes that actually target the upcoming image) may also have another influence:
  
  • High validity primes are excellent predictors of the stimulus to come. Participants are told this at the outset, and they have lots of opportunities to see that it’s true. High-validity primes will therefore produce a warm-up effect and also an expectation effect,
    
    • whereas LOW-VALIDITY PRIMES produce only the warm-up.
    • The combination of warm-up and expectations leads to faster responses than warm-up alone.

EXPLAINING THE COST and BENEFITS –

• STIMULUS-BASED PRIMES – produced merely by the presentation of the priming stimulus, with no role for expectations.
  
  • Stimulus-based priming appears to be “free” – we can prime one detector without taking anything away from other detectors.
• EXPECTATION-BASED PRIMES – Produced only when the participant believes the prime allows a prediction of what’s to come.
  
  • Has a cost:
    
    • With high-validity primes, responses in the misled condition were slower than responses in the neutral condition. That is, misleading the participants actually hurt their performance.
      
      • Priming the “wrong” detector takes something away from the other detectors, and so participants are worse off when they’re misled than when they receive no prime at all.
  • As an analogy, let’s say that you have just $50 to spend on groceries. You can spend more on ice cream if you wish, but if you do, you’ll have less to spend on other foods.
    
    • Expectation-based priming, which shows a (negative) costs when misled, shows that it has a LIMITED-CAPACITY SYSTEM. – if capacity were unlimited, then there would be no cost associated with it.
  • Getting prepared for one target seems to make people less prepared for other targets.
• perceiving involves some work, and this work requires some LIMITED MENTAL RESOURCES— some process or capacity needed for performance, but in limited supply.
  
  • That’s why you can’t listen to two messages at the same time; doing so would require more resources than you have.

SPATIAL ATTENTION— the mechanism through which someone focuses on a particular position in space.

• With high-validity priming (primes that actually target the upcoming image), the data show a benefit from cues that correctly signal where (spatially) the upcoming target will appear.
• Being misled by incorrect prime slowed down response times.
  
  • If the stimulus then shows up on the right, you’re less prepared for it — which is the cost of being misled.

ATTENTION AS a SPOTLIGHT – Visual attention can be compared to a spotlight beam that can “shine” anywhere in the visual field.

• The “beam” marks the region of space for which you are prepared, so inputs within the beam are processed more efficiently.
• The beam can be wide or narrowly focused and can be moved around the visual field.
  
  • The spotlight idea refers to movements of attention, NOT movements of the eyes.
  • The benefits of attention occur BEFORE any eye movement, so they are NOT a consequence of eye movements.

What does it mean to “move attention”?

• The answer involves a network of sites in the frontal cortex and the parietal cortex.
  
  • One cluster of sites (THE ORIENTING SYSTEM) is needed to disengage attention from one target, shift attention to a new target, and then engage attention on the new target.
  • A second set of sites (THE ALERTING SYSTEM) is responsible for maintaining an alert state in the brain.
  • A third set of sites (THE EXECUTIVE SYSTEM) controls voluntary actions.
  • Entirely different sites (including the visual areas in the occipital cortex) do the actual analysis of the incoming information.
• These control signals can amplify (or, in some cases, inhibit) the activity in these other areas and, in this way, they can promote the processing of inputs you’re interested in, and undermine the processing of distractors.
• Thus, there is no spotlight beam. Instead, certain neural mechanisms enable you to adjust your sensitivity to certain inputs.
  
  • a large part of “paying attention” involves priming.
    
    • For stimuli you don’t care about, you don’t bother to prime yourself, and so those stimuli fall on unprepared (and unresponsive) detectors.
    • For stimuli you do care about, you do your best to anticipate the input, and you use these anticipations to prime the relevant processing channel.
      
      • This increases your sensitivity to the desired input, which is just what you want.

WHERE DO PEOPLE “SHINE” THE “SPOtLIGHT BEAM”?

• you pay attention to elements of the input that are visually prominent
• to elements that you think are interesting or important.
• Decisions about what’s important, though, depend on the context.
• The pattern of movements depended on what the viewer was trying to learn.
• Your beliefs about the scene.
  
  • You’re unlikely to focus on elements of a scene that are:
    
    • PREDICTABLE because you’ll gain no information from inspecting things that are already obvious
    • UNEXPECTED – you’re unlikely to focus on aspects of the scene that are totally unexpected.
      
      • EX, you’re walking through a forest, you won’t be on the lookout for a stapler sitting on the ground, and so you may fail to notice the stapler.
        
        • This point provides part of the basis for inattentional blindness and also leads to a pattern called the ULTRA-RARE ITEM EFFECT – The pattern in which rare items are often overlooked
      • Also, people differ in what they pay attention to (individually, by culture).
      • INDIVIDUALISTIC cultures pay attention to the single person – focus on individual people, individual objects, and their attributes.
      • COLLECTIVIST cultures focus on the context and how people and objects are related to one another.
        
        • EX: When asked to make a judgment about the target person’s emotional state, American participants weren’t influenced by the emotional expressions of the people standing in the background, but Japanese participants were.
• ENDOGENOUS CONTROL OF ATTENTION – you choose what to pay attention to.
• EXOGENOUS CONTROL OF ATTENTION – Your attention is involuntarily seized whether you like it or not.

ATTENDING TO OBJECTS OR ATTENDING TO POSITIONS –

• Sometimes you attend to space (position) – If you are getting an overview of an area or waiting for something to pop up in a general area, then your attention is on the space/position rather than a specific object.
• Sometimes you attend to an object – If there is an object within a space that you are interested in, then your attention will focus on that object to the exclusion of the other objects within the immediate space.
• UNILATERAL NEGLECT SYNDROME – The inability to attend to one side of the visual field.
  
  • supports a space-based account of attention.
    
    • HOWEVER, once these patients LOCK onto an object, the object can be rotated to the opposite side of their visual field and they will STILL be able to attend to it.
    • This is evidence that both Space and Objects are attended to.
      
      • First the space, and then the object:
    • The symptoms of neglect syndrome plainly reveal a spatially defined bias. But once attention is directed toward a target, it’s the target itself that defines the focus of attention.
    • This is true of people with intact brains as well.
• Brain Activity when ATTENDING to a SPACE – Various studies have examined the pattern of brain activation when participants are attending to a particular position in space.
  
  • ​These data suggest that the tasks involve different brain circuits — with one set of circuits (the dorsal attention system), near the top of the head, being primarily concerned with spatial attention.
• Brain Activity when ATTENDING to an OBJECT – and the pattern of activation when participants are attending to a particular object is created from a different set of circuits (the ventral attention system) being crucial for nonspatial tasks (Object-oriented).
• Therefore, our description of attention needs to include a mix of object-based and space-based mechanisms.

Question 4

Interim Summary

Answer 4

INTERIM SUMMARY:

• In some circumstances, you seem to INHIBIT the processing of unwanted inputs – a process that benefits from PRACTICE.
• various mechanisms facilitate the processing of desired inputs.
• The key here is PRIMING.
  
  • You’re primed for some stimuli because you’ve encountered them FREQUENTLY in the past, with the result that you’re more likely to process (and therefore more likely to notice) these stimuli if you encounter them again.
    
    • In other cases, the priming depends on your EXPECTATION of what the upcoming stimulus will be.
    • If you can predict what the stimulus will likely be, you can prime the relevant processing pathway so that you’re ready for the stimulus when it arrives.
  • The priming will make you more responsive to the anticipated input if it does arrive, and this gives the anticipated input an advantage relative to other inputs.
    
    • That advantage is what you want – so that you end up perceiving the desired input (the one you’ve prepared yourself for) but don’t perceive the inputs you’re hoping to ignore (because they fall on unprimed detectors).
• Your ability to pay attention depends to a large extent on your ability to anticipate the upcoming stimulus.
  
  • You’ll have a much easier time anticipating materials that you understand as opposed to materials that you don’t understand.
    
    • Likewise, when a stimulus sequence is just beginning, you have little basis for anticipation, so your only option may be to focus on the position in space that holds the sequence.
    • Once the sequence begins, though, you get a sense of how it’s progressing, and this lets you sharpen your anticipations (shifting to object-based attention, rather than space-based) — which, again, makes you more sensitive to the attended input and more resistant to distractors.
• In other words, the term “attention” doesn’t refer to some mechanism in the brain that produces a certain outcome. It’s better to think of attention as itself an outcome — a byproduct of many other mechanisms.

Question 5

Divided Attention

Answer 5

DIVIDED ATTENTION – deal with multiple tasks, or multiple inputs, all at the same time.

• Perceiving requires resources that are in limited supply
• You can perform concurrent tasks only if you have the resources needed for both.
  
  • If the two tasks, when combined, require more resources than you’ve got, then divided attention will fail.

SPECIFICITY OF RESOURCES – Divided attention will be easier if the simultaneous tasks are very different from each other because different tasks are likely to have distinct resource requirements.

• EX: knitting and listening to a podcast will be easier because they do not conflict much with their resource needs.
  
  • These tasks are unlikely to interfere with each other. Even if all your language-related resources are in use for the lecture, this won’t matter for knitting, because it’s not a language-based task.
• EX: Reading a novel while listening to a lecture, however, both have similar cognitive requirements (Language), which will make them compete directly for limited resources, making it very difficult to multitask.

GENERALITY OF RESOURCES – Regardless of the particular resources required by activities, they all draw from a single, larger reservoir of LIMITED MENTAL RESOURCES, so ultimately, even dissimilar activities will compete for resources.

• EX: Consider the common practice of talking on a cell phone while driving. For the phone conversation, you’re relying on language skills. For driving, you need spatial skills. Overall, it looks like there’s little overlap in the specific demands of these two tasks and so little chance that the tasks will compete for resources.
  
  • Though the differing skills do not compete as much as similar skills, there is STILL a limited cognitive resource available for all activities in aggregate.

EXECUTIVE CONTROL – the mechanisms that allow you to control your own thoughts.

• Tasks vary in the “load” they put on you, and the greater the load, the greater the interference with other tasks.
• Executive control helps keep your current goals in mind so that these goals (and not habits) will guide your actions.
  
  • The executive also ensures that your mental steps are organized into the right sequence – one that will move you toward your goals.
    
    • And if your current operations aren’t moving you toward your goal, executive control allows you to shift plans or change strategy.
• Executive control can only handle one task at a time, and this point obviously puts limits on your ability to multitask.
• PRESERVATION ERROR – a tendency to produce the same response over and over even when it’s plain that the task requires a change in the response.
• GOAL NEGLECT – failing to organize their behavior in a way that moves you toward your goals.

Question 6

Practice

Answer 6

PRACTICE – Things that are practiced are heavily primed and therefore easily activated. As a result, they require FEWER Mental Resources than the same skill if not practiced – i.e. Practice diminishes resource demand (the “cost”).

• PRACTICE creates HABIT or ROUTINE which EXECUTIVE CONTROL has little role in. so the resource requirement is low.
  
  • Early in practice, when a task is new, you haven’t formed any relevant habits yet, so you have no habits to fall back on. As a result, executive control is needed all the time.
    
    • Once you’ve done the task over and over, though, you do acquire a repertoire of suitable habits, and so the demand for executive control decreases.
• Therefore, practice makes divided attention easier – enabling the skilled driver to continue chatting with her passenger as they cruise down the highway, even though this combination is hopelessly difficult for the novice driver.

AUTOMATICITY – describe tasks that are well-practiced and involve little (or no) control.

• With practice in a task, then, the need for executive control is diminished, and your control mechanisms are available for other chores, allowing you to divide your attention in ways that would have been impossible before practice.

STROOP INTERFERENCE – participants are shown a series of words and asked to name aloud the color of the ink used for each word. The trick, though, is that the words themselves are color names.

• Strong tendency to read the printed words themselves rather than to name the ink color – this reflects the fact that word recognition is enormously well practiced and therefore can proceed automatically.

WHERE ARE THE LIMITS?

Two simple ideas are key:

• First, tasks require resources
• Second, these resources are limited – you can’t “spend” more resources than you have.

RESOURCE DEMANDS of a task depends on several factors:

• The nature of the TASK matters, of course, so that the resources required by a verbal task (e.g., reading) are different from those required by a spatial task (e.g., remembering a shape).
• The Novelty of the Task and
• The amount of flexibility the task requires also matter.
• Connected to this, practice matters, with well-practiced tasks requiring fewer resources.
  
  • If two tasks make competing demands on TASK-SPECIFIC RESOURCES, the result will be INTERFERENCE.
  • If two tasks make competing demands on TASK-GENERAL RESOURCES (the energy supply or executive control), again the result will be interference.
  • it will be especially difficult to combine tasks that involve similar stimuli.
    
    • EX: Tasks that both involve printed text or that both involve speech.
      
      • The problem here is that similar stimuli can “blur together,” with a danger that you’ll lose track of which elements belong in which input.
• Think of Attention as an ACHIEVEMENT — an achievement of performing multiple activities simultaneously or an achievement of successfully avoiding distraction when you want to focus on a single task.

Question 7

ADHD

Answer 7

ADHD – common diagnosis: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

• common diagnosis: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
• The causes of ADHD are still unclear. Contributing factors that have been mentioned include encephalitis, genetic influences, food allergies, high lead concentrations in the environment, and more
  
  • Some critics suggest that ADHD is often just a convenient categorization for physicians or school counselors who don’t know how else to think about an especially energetic child.
• There are many steps involved in “paying attention,” and some of those steps involve inhibition
  
  • ​People with ADHD have less effective inhibitory circuits in their brains, making them more vulnerable to momentary impulses and chance distractions.
    
    • This is what leads to their scattered thoughts, their difficulty in schoolwork, and so on.

RITALIN – Drug that’s a powerful stimulant

• It seems ironic that we’d give a stimulant to people who are already described as too active and too
• Ritalin is effective in treating actual cases of ADHD — plausibly because the drug activates the inhibitory circuits within the brain, helping the person to guard against wayward impulses.

Some of the promising alternatives involve –

• restructuring of the environment.
• reducing the sources of distraction in their surroundings.
• surround them with helpful cues — reminders of what they’re supposed to be doing

Our description of ADHD requires multiple parts –

• The diagnosis probably is overused, but the diagnosis is surely genuine in many cases, and the problems involved in ADHD are real and serious.
• symptoms of ADHD diminish as the years go by