Chapter 4- Attention Flashcards
Attention
The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations.
Selective attention
Attending to one thing while ignoring others
Distraction
One stimulus interfering with the processing of another stimulus
Divided attention
Paying attention to more than one thing at a time
Attentional capture
A rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement.
Visual scanning
The movement of eyes from one location or object to another.
Cherry attention study
Cherry studied attention and used a technique called dichotic listening, where different stimuli were presented to the left and right ears using headphones. The participants focused on the message going to one ear and then repeated it out loud. The process of repeating the words is called shadowing. Participants could easily shadow the stimuli in one ear. They could report whether the voice in the unattended message was male or female, but not what they’d said. Broadbent’s filter model of attention was designed to explain the results of this experiment.
Cocktail party effect
The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli. Even in noisy environments, people are able to focus on one conversation they’re having.
4 stages of Broadbent’s filter model of attention
- Sensory memory
- Filter
- Detector
- The output from the detector goes to short term memory
Broadbent’s filter model of attention
Broadbent’s model of attention was designed to explain how it’s possible to focus on one message and why information isn’t taken in from the other message. This model is called an early selection model since irrelevant information is eliminated by the filter early in this process before it can be analyzed. It filters based on the physical properties of the message rather than its content. It also provided testable predictions about selective attention, which lead to further research. Treats attention as a bottleneck.
Sensory memory
Holds all of the incoming information for a fraction of a second and then transfers all of it to the filter.
Filter
The filter identifies the message that’s being attended to based on its physical characteristics. These include the speech’s tone, pitch, speed of talking, and accent. Only the attended message will pass through to the next stage.
Detector
The detector processes information from the attended message to determine higher level characteristics, like the meaning of the message. The detector processes everything that passes through it, since irrelevant stuff was already filtered out in the filter stage.
In Broadbent’s model, what happens to output from the detector?
The output from the detector goes to short term memory. Short term memory holds information for 10-15 seconds and can then transfer the information to long term memory.
Moray dichotic listening experiment
This was another early selection model. Participants were told to shadow the message presented to one ear. However, when the participant’s name was presented to the unattended ear, about one third of participants recognized it. This meant that the person’s name had not been filtered out, and that it had been analyzed enough to determine its meaning, in contrast to predictions. This is similar to when you still hear someone say your name in a noisy room.
The attenuator analyzes incoming messages in terms of (3)
- Its physical characteristics- pitch, speed, etc
- Its language- how the message groups into syllables or words
- Its meaning
How is Treisman’s attenuation model of attention different from Broadbent’s?
Information in the channel is selected similar to what Broadbent proposed, but in this model language and meaning can also be used to separate messages.
Treisman’s attenuation model of attention
Treisman proposed that the analysis of the message proceeds only as far as is necessary to identify the attended message. For example, analysis at the physical level of each message could be used to separate them if there’s one male and one female speaker. However, meaning might be necessary to separate the messages if the voices sound similar. This is a late selection model.
Stages of Treisman’s attenuation model of attention
In this model, the attended and unattended messages are identified first. Then both messages pass through the attenuator, but only the unattended message is attenuated (weakened). At least some of the unattended message gets through, so the model is called the leaky filter model. The message is then analyzed by the dictionary unit- it contains words, stored in memory, and each of which has a threshold for being activated.
According to Treisman’s attenuation model of attention, which words have low thresholds?
Words that are common or important, like the participants’ name, have low thresholds. These words can be activated even with a weak signal, like when it’s spoken softly, unattended, or obscured by other words.
McKay study
Participants listened to ambiguous sentences, such as “they threw stones at the bank”- bank can have two meanings. In the unattended ear, words like “river” or “money” were played as biasing words. The biasing words influenced whether participants believed the ambiguous sentence had been about a river or about a financial institution.
Therefore, the biasing words must have been processed enough that the meaning was registered, even though participants were unaware that they had heard it.
Late selection models of attention
McKay’s research led to the proposal of late selection models of attention- proposed that most of the incoming information is processed to the level of meaning before the message to be further processed is selected. In a true late selection model all messages receive full acoustic AND semantic analysis. Selection takes place after ALL messages have been fully analyzed
Are early or late selection models of attention more accurate?
There is no one answer to the “early-late” controversy. Early selection and late selection are demonstrated in different situations depending on the task and the type of stimuli.
Which 2 factors must be considered when asking people to ignore distracting stimuli?
Processing capacity and perceptual load
Processing capacity
Refers to the amount of information people can handle and sets a limit on their ability to process incoming information.
Perceptual load
Related to the difficulty of a task. Low load tasks are generally easy, well practiced tasks that have a low perceptual load. High load tasks use up more of an individual’s processing ability
Load theory of attention (Lavie)
You are less likely to be distracted when participating in a high load task. With a low load task, there is still processing capacity left. Therefore, resources are still available to process the task irrelevant stimulus, and the response time slows down. With a high load task, there are no resources left to process irrelevant stimuli.
Lavie study
Lavie’s study asked participants to press a key if they saw an X or N on a screen. This was easy if the target letter was surrounded by other letters that were all the same, but more difficult if it was surrounded by different letters. Including an unrelated stimulus, like a cartoon character, increases the reaction times more for the easy task than it does for the hard task.
Other than a low perceptual load, what other factor could make you easily distracted?
It also depends how powerful the irrelevant stimulus is. If the fire alarm went off, a person would probably be distracted regardless of the load of their task.
Stroop effect
Difficulty naming the colors of the words. This occurs because the names of the words cause a competing response and therefore slow responding to the target (naming the color of ink). The task irrelevant stimuli (reading the actual words) is strong in this situation. Reading is an automatic response that is difficult to ignore.
Why do you need to look at things directly to have detailed vision?
Due to the way the retina is constructed, objects in central vision fall on a small area (the fovea) which has better detail vision than the peripheral retina.
Fixation
Fixing your eyes on a specific object
Saccadic eye movement
A rapid, jerky movement from one fixation to the next. Even when you aren’t searching for anything, your eyes still move 3 times per second.
Overt attention
Shifting attention from one place to another by moving the eyes
Stimulus salience
The physical properties of the stimulus, like color, contrast, or movement. Determining how salience influences the way we scan a scene typically involves analyzing characteristics like color, orientation, and intensity at each location in the scene and then combining these values to make a saliency map of the scene.
Is stimulus salience a bottom up or top down process?
Using stimulus salience for attention is a bottom up process because it depends on the patterns of color and contrast in a stimulus. You are responding to the physical property of the stimulus rather than its meaning.
High salience
An object has higher salience if it sticks out while looking at a scene. An individual’s first few fixations are usually on high salience areas. After a few fixations, scanning begins to be influenced by top down processes.
How do cognitive factors influence scanning?
There are variations in how people scan scenes- everyone might not scan a salient feature first. Scanning is also influenced by a person’s preferences, making it a top down process.
Scene schemas
An observer’s knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes. This is a top down process involved in scanning.
How do the demands of a task influence scanning?
The timing of when people look at specific places is determined by the sequence of actions involved in a task. Eye movements occur just before we need the information they provide. Therefore, eye movements usually precede motor action. They predict what will come next in the sequence of actions.
Covert attention
Shifting attention while keeping the eyes still. This occurs when you are paying attention to something off to the side while looking straight ahead. It involves is a mental shift of attentional focus - like a spotlight beam
Precuing
Determines whether presenting a cue indicating where a test stimulus will appear enhances the processing of the target stimulus.
Posner precuing study
Participants watched a screen. In 80% of trials, an arrow appeared instructing participants to look on one side of the screen for the target square. In 20% of trials, their attention was directed away. Participants reacted (pressed a key) to the square more quickly when their attention had been directed to that side of the screen.
This result gave rise to the idea that attention is like a spotlight that improves processing when directed at a specific location.
Same object advantage
Faster responding that occurs when enhancement spreads within an object. Participants respond to a target more rapidly when a stimulus appears at the location they were told it would be.
How does attention affect perception?
Attending to an object makes it more clear and vivid, therefore, attention affects perception.
How does attention affect physiological responding?
Directing attention to a specific area of space activates a specific area of the cortex. Brain maps generated through fMRI studies showed that different parts of the brain will experience different levels of activation when viewing a stimulus. There is a “map of categories” that changes for each stimulus.
Attentional warping
The map of categories on the brain changes so more space is allotted to categories that are being searched for. This effect also occurs when the attended category isn’t present in the stimulus.
For example, when a person is on the lookout for vehicles, the brain becomes “warped” or tuned so that large brain areas respond best to vehicles and things related to vehicles. Then, a large response occurs when they see a vehicle. Other things the person isn’t looking for would cause smaller responses.
Automatic processing
A type of processing that occurs without intention (happens automatically) and at a cost of only some of a person’s cognitive resources. You carry out many skills automatically. This is why you can drive home and not remember how you got there/not remember the actual trip.
Schneider and Shiffrin study
Studied divided attention and required participants to carry out two tasks simultaneously. After many trials, the task of identifying the target stimuli among the distractor stimuli became automatic and accuracy increased. The many trials of practice resulted in automatic processing
In which situations does divided attention become more difficult?
If task difficulty increases, automatic processing is not possible even with practice. While driving in a construction zone for example, you might have to turn off your radio or stop your conversation with your passengers in order to devote all of your cognitive resources to driving.
Distractions
Things that direct our attention away from something we’re doing.
Why is speaking on the phone dangerous while driving?
The issue of driving while speaking on the phone has nothing to do with holding the phone itself. The issue is that speaking on the phone uses cognitive resources that would normally be devoted to driving. Other technologies for information/entertainment in cars can be even more dangerous than cell phone use, regardless of whether it takes your eyes off of the road.
Experience sampling
Answers the question “what percentage of the time during the day are people engaged in a specific behavior?” One method that could be used is sending participants text probes throughout the day asking them if they were doing a specific thing.
Used in a study to determine how often students used the internet
Operant conditioning
Behavior is controlled by rewards (reinforcements) that follow behaviors. The basic principle is that the best way to ensure that behavior will continue is to reinforce it intermittently.
Why do many people have a hard time not checking their phone?
Operant conditioning- people will check their phone and see they don’t have any texts, but they will have a text the next time they check. This is an intermittent reinforcer that makes people continue to check their phone.
Continuous partial attention
Constant switching from one activity to the other
Mind wandering
Thoughts coming from within, also called daydreaming. Mind wandering is very prevalent and occurs about half the time that people are awake, and during a wide range of activities.
Mindless reading
When you’re reading something and then realize you have no idea what you just read. This is an example of how mind wandering decreases performance.
Mind wandering is associated with which part of the brain?
The default mode network- it becomes active when someone isn’t focusing on a task. During mind wandering, a person is no longer focusing on their task. This presents an issue when you need to be focusing.
Inattentional blindness
Occurs when people are unaware of clearly visible stimuli if they aren’t directing their attention to them. The gorilla video is an example
Inattentional deafness
We can also miss auditory stimuli we aren’t attending to. Visual search- involves scanning a scene to find a specific object. When participants were given a difficult visual task, they often didn’t hear the tone that was played during the task.
How can the load theory of attention explain the effects of inattention?
Researchers showed that being involved in a high load task increases the chances of missing other stimuli.
Change detection
A procedure where one picture is presented followed by another picture, and the task is to determine what the difference is between them.
Change blindness
Difficulty detecting changes in scenes, like in spot the difference pictures. Change blindness is extremely common. It also occurs when people fail to notice continuity errors in films
Continuity errors
When an aspect of the scene that should remain the same has changed
Why does change blindness occur?
Change blindness usually occurs because our attention isn’t directed at the place in the scene where the change occurs.
How do our perceptual systems ensure that we pay attention to important information?
Our perceptual system also has a warning system that directs our attention to motion or intense stimuli, which could signal danger. This allows us to respond quickly. You don’t need to know all of the details of what’s going on around you. You need to know whether a sidewalk is crowded, but not what color shirt the person next to you is wearing.
Why is missing some perceptual information adaptive?
By focusing on what’s important, our perceptual system is making optimal use of our limited processing resources.
Binding
The process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object.
Binding problem
The question of how an object’s individual features are bound together.
Feature integration theory
According to feature integration theory (Treisman), the first step in object processing is the preattentive stage (analyze into features), followed by the focused attention stage (combine features). In early stage processing, you see independent features. In late stage processing, features are bound together into an object through attention.
Pre attentive stage
This occurs before we focus attention on an object, and attention is not involved. This stage is automatic, unconscious, and effortless. The features of objects are analyzed independently in separate areas of the brain and are not associated with a specific object.
Focused attention stage
Attention is focused on an object and the independent features are combined, so the observer is consciously aware of the whole object.
Illusory conjunctions
Seeing shapes that were made up of a combination of two features from different stimuli. These feature combinations are called illusory conjunctions. Illusory conjunctions can occur even if the stimuli have large differences in size or shape. Outside of a laboratory setting, individuals may still experience illusory conjunctions. Witnesses to events might mix up the colors of specific objects. This is evidence for feature integration theory.
Why do illusory conjunctions occur?
Illusory conjunctions occur because in the preattentive stage, each feature is “free floating” and exists separately from the others. Therefore, these features can be incorrectly combined if more than one object is present.
Balint’s syndrome
Parietal lobe damage results in an inability to focus attention on individual objects. According to feature integration theory, lack of focused attention would make it difficult for patient RM to combine features correctly. He reported illusory conjunctions even when he had viewed the stimuli for a long period of time.
Is feature analysis a top down or bottom up process?
Feature analysis is usually a bottom up process since knowledge isn’t involved, but top down processing can play a role. In one study, participant’s knowledge of the usual color of objects reduced illusory conjunctions.
Conjunction search
A visual search task where you are searching for a combination of two features in the same stimulus. This takes longer than a typical feature search. Attention to location is required for a conjunction search- RM had difficulty with this. He was able to find targets when only a feature search was required, however.
Ventral attention network
Controls attention based on salience
Dorsal attention network
Controls attention based on top down processes
How does effective connectivity change in the brain?
Different tasks don’t just shift activity from one pathway to another. They also change the effective connectivity between different areas in a network. Activation of the network can open more activity “lanes” for information to flow through. Effective connectivity could change based on synchronization of action potentials in different brain areas.
Effective connectivity
This refers to how easily activity can travel along a particular pathway.
Executive attention network
This network is complex and may involve 2 different networks. It is responsible for executive functions. Executive function includes a range of processes that involve controlling attention and dealing with conflicting responses. The Stroop test is an example of conflicting responses. The executive attention network helps you to resist temptations/gain willpower.
Cherry attention study results
Content memory for unattended message usually was bad. (Even word repeated 35 times not noticed). Language change was sometimes detected, but not always. Relatively good accuracy for reporting changes to perceptual characteristics, like a voice gender change or a human voice versus noise (or tones)
Why is Broadbent’s model considered an early selection model?
Only the attended message receives higher level meaning-based processing, and only the attended message can affect behavior.
Limitations of Broadbent’s filter model (4)
- What something important happens in the unattended messages?
- The cocktail party effect
- Selective attention is difficult if simultaneous messages are of similar content- meaning of unattended message is getting through
- Shadowers sometimes follow message to the wrong ear when the streams are switched (Treisman)
Automaticity
Automatic processes do not drain the pool of
the resource (attention). Occurs without intention and does not reveal itself to conscious awareness
Controlled attention
Decide what to pay attention to and what not
to pay attention to
Priming
Word activates or primes its meaning in memory, and also activates
related meanings in
memory. Makes related
meanings easier to access
Proofreading
When counting certain letters in a word, we tend to miss letters when the word they occur in is highly frequent. Automatic “gluing” of letter to its word
Facilitation
Posner cue study- a faster-
than-baseline response resulting from useful advance information (faster response to cues)
Cost
Posner cue study- a response slower than
baseline because of a misleading cue
Spotlight of visual attention
The mental attention-focusing mechanism that prepares you to encode stimulus information, moves the spotlight around the visual field. Independent from the actual eye gaze
Inhibition of return
People are slower at responding to stimuli at a
previously cued location (around after 300 ms). People are also slower to respond to a change in an
area that was recently searched. This keeps attention from repeatedly searching the same
locations too soon. It encourages orienting towards novel locations and hence might facilitate foraging and other search behaviors
Object based attention (Egly)
We notice/respond faster to an event occurring in a location. Attention can be allocated to a place on an object. The enhancing effect of attention spreads throughout the
object. Attention directed to a feature of an object can enhance
processing of other features of the object
Problems with feature integration theory (4)
- Features are not informative enough on their own
- Features mean different things depending on the way in which they are combined
- Possible combinations are too much- combinatorial explosion
- Is there a higher-order way to meaningfully organize combinations of features
Hemispatial neglect
Disruption or
decreased ability to attend to something in one
half of the visual field. Deficit in directing spatial attention- disengaging attention from the ipsi-lesional side (same side of lesion), and shifting attention to contra-lesional side (neglected side of the space
