Chapter 4: ATTENTION AND CONSCIOUSNESS Flashcards
- It allows us to use our limited mental resources judiciously. We can focus more on the stimuli that interest us by focusing less on outside stimuli and inner stimuli that are not of interest to us.
- It includes both conscious and unconscious processes.
- We select and process a limited amount of information; captured by our senses, our stored memories and other cognitive processes.
ATTENTION
- Both feeling of awareness and the content of awareness, which may be under the focus of attention under the focus of attention.
CONSCIOUSNESS
Three Purposes of Consciousness
- Monitors interactions with the environment.
- Assists us in linking our past and present to give a sense of continuity.
- Control and plan for future actions based from monitoring and links between past memories and present sensations.
Four (4) Main Functions of Attention
- Signal detection and Vigilance
- Search
- Selective Attention
- Divided Attention
We try to detect the appearance of a particular stimulus
Signal detection and Vigilance
We engage in an active search for particular stimuli
Search
We choose to attend to some stimuli and ignore others. Focusing our attention helps us execute other cognitive processes, such as verbal comprehension or problem solving.
Selective Attention
We engage in more than one task at a time, and we shift our attentional resources to allocate them as needed.
Divided Attention
- People pick out the important stimuli embedded in a wealth of irrelevant, distracting stimuli.
- Often used to measure sensitivity to target’s presence.
Signal Detection Theory (SDT)
What are the four (4) possible outcomes of Signal Detection Theory (SDT)?
- Hits — “true positives”
- False Alarms — “false positives”
- Misses — “false negatives”
- Correct Rejections — “true negatives”
Detect a signal (Present)
Hit
Do not detect a signal (Present)
Miss
Detect a signal (Absent)
False Alarm
Do not detect a signal (Absent)
Correct Rejection
- Ability to attend a field of stimulation over a prolonged period
- Watchfully waits to detect a signal stimulus that may appear at an unknown time
- Needed in setting in which a given stimulus occurs rarely but requires immediate attention as soon it occurs
Vigilance
- Involves using our attentional resources to actively and often skillfully seek out a target.
- Scan of the environment for particular features - actively looking for something when you are not sure where it will appear.
Search
Two (2) different kinds of search(es)
- Feature Search
- Conjunction Search
Look for just one feature (ex: color, shape, and size)
Feature Search
Combines two or more features
Conjunction Search
- Explains why it is relatively easy to conduct feature searches and relatively difficult to conduct conjunction searches
Feature Integration Theory (Search)
Proponents of Feature Integration Theory
- Anne Treisman (1986)
- Nobel laureates David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel (1979)
Two (2) stages when we perceived objects
- Color and Size
- Connecting two (2) or more features with some “mental glue”
Automatic and does not need for cognitive processing
Color and Size
Requires conscious attention; have to combine the features we are searching one by one
Connecting two (2) or more features with some “mental glue”
- The more similar target and distracter are, the more difficult it is to find the target.
- The difficulty of search tasks depends on how different distracters are from each other. But it does not depend on the number of features to be integrated.
Similar Theory
- Proponent of Selective Attention and Cocktail Party Problem
- He devised a task known as shadowing
- He presented a separate message to each ear — “dichotic presentation”
Collin Cherry (1953)
Tracking one conversation while distracted by other conversation
Cocktail Party Problem
Listening to two different messages
Shadowing
Separate message to each ear
Dichotic Presentation
Initial performance was poor for the two tasks when the tasks had to be performed at the same time (enough practice, participants improved)
Dual Task Paradigm
When you shift your focus from one thing to another, a tiny gap in attention called attentional blink is created. It only lasts for about half a second, so we barely notice it.
Attentional Blink
- One model suggests that one single pool of
attentional resources can be divided freely. - Another model suggests multiple sources of
attention are available, one for each modality.
Theories of Divided Attention
Divided attention in everyday life
Dual-Task Performance
Factors that influence our ability to pay attention
- Anxiety
- Arousal
- Task Difficulty
- Skills
Being anxious by nature (trait-based anxiety) or by situation (state-based anxiety), places constraints on attention.
Anxiety
Your overall state of arousal affects attention as well. You may be tired, drowsy, or drugged, which may limit attention. Being excited sometimes enhances attention.
Arousal
Working on task that is difficult or novel needs more attentional resources than when you work on an easy or highly familiar task.
Task Difficulty
The more practiced and skilled you are in performing a task, the more your attention is enhanced.
Skills
Neuroscience and Attention: A network model
- Alerting
- Orienting
- Executive Attention
- Being “prepared” to attend to some incoming event, and maintaining this attention.
- The brain areas involved in alerting are the right frontal and parietal cortex, locus coeruleus
Alerting
- The selection of stimuli to attend to
- This kind of attention is needed when we perform a visual search
Orienting
- Includes processes for monitoring and resolving conflicts that arise among internal processes.
Executive Attention
When our attention fails us
- Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
- Change blindness / Inattentional blindness
Three (3) primary symptoms of ADHD
- Inattention
- Hyperactivity
- Impulsiveness
Three (3) main types of ADHD, depending on which symptoms are predominant
- Hyperactive - Impulsive
- Inattentive
- Combination of hyperactive - impulsive and inattentive behavior
Children with the inattentive type of ADHD or ADH show several distinctive symptoms:
- They are easily distracted by irrelevant sights and sounds.
- They often fail to pay attention to details
- They are susceptible to making careless mistakes in their work.
- They often fail to read instructions completely or carefully.
- They are susceptible to forgetting or losing things they need for tasks, such as
pencils or books. - They tend to jump from one incomplete task to another.
Is an inability to detect changes in objects or scenes that are being viewed.
Change Blindness
Is a phenomenon in which people are not able to see things that are actually there.
Inattentional Blindness
Is an attentional dysfunction in which participants ignore the half of their visual field that is contralateral to (on the opposite side of) the hemisphere of the brain that has a lesion.
Spatial Neglect / Hemineglect — One Half of the World Goes Amiss
- they are performed without conscious awareness
- require little or no intention or effort
- multiple automatic processes may occur at once, or atleast quickly, and in no particular sequence
Automatic Process
- Require intentional effort
- Require full conscious awareness
- Consume many attentional resources
- Performed serially
- Relatively time-consuming execution, as compared with automatic processes
- Usually difficult tasks
Controlled Process
The process by which a procedure changes from being highly conscious to being relatively automatic
Automatization (Proceduralization)
- Proposed by Gordon Logan
- He suggested that automatization occurs because we gradually accumulate knowledge about specific responses to specific stimuli
- Preliminary finding suggest that Logan’s theory may better explain specific responses to specific stimuli, such as calculating arithmetic combinations
Instance Theory
- Named after John Ridley Stroop
- In 1935, Stroop observed a peculiar phenomenon of visual selective attention
- It demonstrates the psychological difficulty in selectively attending to the color of the ink and trying to ignore the word that is printed with the ink of that color
Stroop Effect
Human errors shows that error can be classified as either as mistakes or as slips.
Mistakes we make in automatic processes
Are errors in choosing an objective or in specifying a means of achieving it
Mistakes
Are errors in carrying out an intended means for reaching an objective
Slips
In general, slips are most likely to happen when two circumstances occur:
- When we must deviate from a routine and automatic processes in appropriately over intentional, controlled processes
- When our automatic processes are interrupted
Slips associated with automatic processes
Type of Errors:
- Capture Errors
- Omissions
- Perseverations
- Description Errors
- Data-driven Errors
- Associative-activation Errors
- Loss of Activation Errors
Information that is available for cognitive processing but that currently lies outside conscious awareness exists at the preconscious level of awareness.
Preconscious Processing
Studying the Preconscious — Priming
- participants are presented with a first stimulus (the prime)
- the participants are presented with a second stimulus and make judgement
- occurs when recognition of certain stimuli is affected by prior presentation of the same or similar stimuli
- In which you try to remember something that is stored in memory but that cannot readily retrieve
- Apparently universal
- Older adults have more tip-of the-tongue experiences compared with younger adults
The Tip of the Tongue Phenomenon
- traces of visual perceptual ability in blind areas
- when forced to guess about a stimulus in the “blind region”, they correctly guess locations and orientation of objects at above chance levels.
Blindsight
