Chp 4 - Attention Flashcards
Attention (1+3)
The mental energy or resource necessary for completing mental processes; the mental process of concentrating effort on a stimulus or a mental event.
- Characteristics of attention:
→ Limited capacity
→ Flexible
→ Can be voluntarily controlled
What captures our attention?
- Novelty
- Change/Difference
- Social Cues based on personal importance
Alertness
degree to which we are awake, responsive, and able to monitor/interact with our environment
Vigilance + brain regions (5)
maintenance of attention (i.e., alertness) over long periods of time in order to monitor for the presence of a stimulus/event
→ involves coordination of many brain regions including parts of the:
- frontal
- prefrontal,
- inferior parietal,
- superior temporal cortices
- cingulate gyrus
What are various factors seem to affect our ability to stay vigilant? (3+2)
→ Neurological/physiological state (e.g., fatigue, etc.)
→ Frequency of target stimulus appearance
→ “Busyness” of surrounding environment
Need a certain amount of arousal to be focused
- Alert, mind not wandering
- Over the needed amount: shaking, fast heartbeat
e.g. performance anxiety
* The longer we are asked to stay vigilant, the more our task performance suffers! (many things fighting for your attention)
Difference in Stress and Anxiety
Stress: long periods of high arousal, long periods of anxiety
Anxiety: momentary experience
Orienting reflex/response
The reflexive redirection of
attention/focus to an unexpected event
Kids and fetuses in utero can do so
Attention capture
redirection of attention to stimuli based on physical characteristics. Frequently driven by:
→ Novelty
→ Change/difference
→ Social cues
bottom-up processing
Habituation
responses diminish once events are
no longer unexpected
- top-down
Goal-driven attention
the individual has a goal, and guides the attentional processes in service of that goal
→ example of top-down processing
→ space-based attention (“spotlight”)
Stimulus-driven attention
attention is guided by the stimuli themselves rather than observer goals
→ example of bottom-up processing
→ Much research has studied attention capture in visual contexts
Feature search
participants instructed to search for a single feature (e.g., the letter S)
Every day: looking for keys: visual search
Pop-out effect
occurs when the target is highly discriminable
from the distractor items
Present even if there are more symbols, not dependent on the amount of distractors
Conjunction search
participants instructed to search for two features in combination (e.g., letter F in bold type)
Not parallel processing,
Processing one at a time
Inhibition of return
places already searched are marked as no return
Feature Integration Theory (3)
Proposes that visual searching is a two stage process
→ Stage 1: Basic perceptual features are registered quickly and efficiently (pre-attentive processing) (feature search)
→ Stage 2: Attention must be focused on items individually (post-attentive processing)
When the target item that has sth extra, rt is faster than when target item doesnt have sth
Limits to visual attention: Wolfe et al. (2005) experiment
Low target prevalence:
Participants asked to press onebutton if the target was present, another if it was absent
→ High-prevalence condition: target
present in 50% of trials
→ Medium-prevalence condition:
target present in 10% of trials
→ Low prevalence: target present in 1% of the trials
Results:
→ Compared with high and medium prevalence conditions, number of trials in which the target was missed was much higher in the low-prevalence condition
→ Expectation that the target will be absent?
- Due to the fact that low prev: no response is almost always correct
Limits to visual attention (5)
- low target prevalence
- searching for multiple targets
- the attentional blink
- inattentional blindness
- change blindness
Attentional blink
suggests that successful attentional deployment needs recovery time
The difficulty in perceiving and responding to the second of two target stimuli amid a RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) stream of distracting stimuli.
The second target is often missed if it appears within 200 to 500 ms of the first target.
- Attention to the first target prevents awareness of the second. This deficit is so powerful that subjects cannot even report a very salient target stimulus, such as a uniquely oriented item, that would otherwise support a rapid and efficient ‘feature pop-out’ search.
Inattentional blindness (3)
- Situations in which aspects of the visual scene go unnoticed because attention is focused somewhere else
- Probability of noticing the unattended stimulus impacted by:
1) demands of the task
2) Visual similarity
Change Blindness
a failure to detect changes in the presence, identity or location of objects in scenes, is also strongest when subjects do not expect changes to occur.
Demonstrates limited capacity to take in all aspects of a scene at the same time
- For example, over half of real-world observers failed to note a change in the identity of a person that they were conversing with, when the change was made during a brief occlusion (such as workers carrying a door between the conversing people)
- Unlike inattentional blindness paradigms, however, visually salient changes can be difficult to detect even when the observer expects and actively searches for such changes.
Selective attention tasks: dichotic listening task
Early researchers used dichotic listening tasks to examine auditory attention
- attention controlled through the use of speech shadowing, in which the participants repeat the message they hear in one ear or the other
Ignored (unattended) information:
1.Still shows evidence of priming
2.Can enter conscious awareness if highly salient
Suggests that strict early selection models are incorrect
Selection theories
Stages of processing
- Early selection
- Late selection
Early selection
is the idea that a stimulus can be selected for further processing or be tossed out as irrelevant before perceptual analysis of the stimulus is complete.
