Determinants of selective attention Flashcards
What determines what we pay attention to?
Top down goals eg. looking for taxi or looking for a friend
“Bottom up” stimulus characteristics
Physical properties of the things around us – e.g. signs here designed to get our attention
But our attention could go involuntarily to other things eg. a sign
Why do we need involuntary attention?
Imagine if you can go to a library and completely focus
We need involuntary attention because we can’t predict what might happen- eg. if hit by a book it will allow you to duck
We have to prioritise info without having already known what might happen
Key vocab
Bottom up- driven by stimulus
- Stimulus-driven
- Exogenous
These 3 mean a similar thing and are grouped by:
- Involuntary attention
- Reflexive attention
Top down
- Goal-driven
- Endogenous
These are also grouped together and people sometimes refer to them as attentional/ executive/ voluntary
- Attentional control
- Executive attention
- Voluntary attention
Biased Competition Theory Desimone & Duncan (1995)
What does the model look like?
Top-down attentional control mechanisms
| (goes down to)
Competition among multiple stimuli for representation
| (goes up to)
Bottom-up sensory-driven mechanisms sensitive to stimulus salience
-> Output to response & memory systems
Biased Competition Theory Desimone & Duncan (1995)
What gets selected and explaining theories?
Having two things going on eg. top down focusing on taxis and sign having bottom-up signal
The winner between these 2 gets selected
This idea that our attention is influenced by both top-down and bottom up underlies many of the current theories of selective attention. For example, biased comp. However, there is some disagreement between the respective roles.
What kind of stimuli can “capture” our attention?
- Stimuli of high salience
- Movement/ ‘abrupt onset’ (suddenly appear)
- Things that are relevant to us/relate to our values
- Or…none? Is stimulus-driven attentional capture not possible?
Salient colour singletons
“odd one out”
salience- how much something stands out
Red apple attracts our attention due to being different from the others
Salient ‘singletons’ Theeuwes (1992)
Singleton Attentional Capture Task
- Task
- Result
- Can top-down mechanisms focus attention only on shapes?
- Find circle
- Colour “singleton” increases search RTs
- Theeuwes’ interpretation: complete top-down selectivity not possible
Even though you were looking for shapes, your attention was distracted by colour
Theeuwes: Stimulus-driven selection
Bottom-up BEFORE top-down
Traditional two-stage approach to attention
‘Pre attentive’ analysers -> (bottom up) -> selection (top down modulation?) -> output to response & memory systems
Top down modulation only comes in at selection step
Saliency map (e.g. Koch & Ullman, 1985)
E.g. Surf line well-represented as it contrasts in terms of intensity, orientation, colour
Things in lighter colours are more salient (stand out more)
Theeuwes: Stimulus-driven selection
Bottom-up BEFORE top-down
First stage and Second stage
First stage:
- Initial sweep across visual field, entirely bottom-up
- Calculation of local salience
(How much does this differ from surrounding image attributes along some dimension such as colour, shape, luminance, size etc?)
- Attention → location with highest local feature contrast or salience
Second stage:
- Is selected item target? If not location inhibited.
- Attention then shifts to item that is next in line with respect to salience.
Theewes: Stimulus-driven selection
Bottom-up BEFORE top-down
Describe new model
Calculation of local salience -> most salient item selected -> is this what I was looking for (top-down modulation?) NO = Bottom-up input back to start, YES= Output to response & memory systems
- Where does stimulus-driven selection only take place?
- _____ vary size of ______ ?
- Within attentional window
- Spatial cues can vary size of attentional window
The attentional window example
If you’re in times square if you know you’re looking for taxis and they are at the bottom of the road, a sign won’t capture your attention because even though its salient, its not in your attentional window
- what does not capture atttention?
Singletons outside cued location do not capture attention (e.g. Theeuwes, 1991)
Contingent capture
Folk & Remington (1992)
- ________ NOT _______
- What can attention only be captured by?
- Although….
- Attentional capture NOT stimulus-driven
- Attention can only be captured by stimuli relevant to our goals
- Although in some cases this relevance may be less obvious
Contingent attention capture
Times square example
Does the yellow sign capture our attention because it is salient, or because we were looking for a yellow taxi?
Brain was looking for something yellow so went to the sign
Contingent capture
Folk & Remington (1992)
What does the task involve?
Task: Is target = or X
- Cues valid or invalid
- Cue might appear which shows location target will appear (valid) or direct you to the wrong location (invalid)
- Target defined by onset
- Measuring how slowed down we are see whether our attention is cued
- Target defined by unique onset or colour
- Cue also defined by either onset or colour
- Seeing would particular cues only distract you depending on what you’re looking for
Contingent capture
Folk & Remington (1992)
Results
- Invalid cues produced slower RTs… attentional capture
- BUT this was contingent on relation to task:
–Colour cues capture attention when target was defined on colour
–Onset cues captures attention when target was defined on onset
–But not vice versa….
–Suggests attentional capture contingent on task goals
Theeuwes’ colour singleton was irrelevant to task
Target was defined by shape – therefore colour should be irrelevant
However this was contradicted by Bacon & Egeth (1994)
Bacon & Egeth (1994)
Task and results
- Search for singleton shape singleton detection search strategy
- i.e. “spot the odd one out”
- Therefore, singleton colour IS relevant to top down goals
Expt: Shape target no longer singleton
Result: Colour singleton no longer interferes
Theeuwes (2004)
1. What did Bacon & Egeth’s task show in relation to local salience of singleton
2. What interferes when target non-singleton
3. IF…
- Bacon & Egeth’s task reduced local salience of singleton
- Colour singleton DOES interfere when target non-singleton…
- …IF local salience is maintained
What is abrupt onset?
What is the theory?
Abrupt onset = something which suddenly appears
Another theory: Only abrupt onsets can produce stimulus driven capture
Abrupt onsets (Yantis and colleagues)
Task and results
Task: Is there an S present?
Result:
- Singleton was not predictive of target location
- And could be either colour singleton, or onset
- Onsets produced attentional capture
- …but colour singletons didn’t
stimulus driven capture might be possible but for less things
Why might it be important to detect abrupt onset?
Safety
Perhaps if you don’t have the ability to notice new things that suddenly appear and potentially react to them, you might get eaten by a lion.
Franconeri & Simons (2003)
- Moving or looming stimuli also capture attention
- But receding stimuli don’t
- Note- in these tasks the targets appear as OFFSETS
- So onsets should be irrelevant to top-down goals… or are they?
Display-wide settings: Another argument against stimulus-driven capture (Gibson & Kelsey, 1998)
- Attention tasks usually begin with some kind of change to display
- E.g. Task stimuli onset, or offset, or change colour etc
- This may induce general “display-wide” settings for dynamic changes… (maybe people were waiting for a change on the computer to happen, so any change that happens would be relevant to your goal)
…including onsets!
- It’s hard to think of any experimental task not involving any change to the display!
Attentional capture: beyond physical salience
How can things seem to attract attention?
Sometimes things seem to attract attention because of their meaning (e.g. threat)
…or personal relevance
Attentional capture: beyond physical salience
Purkis, Lester & Field (2011):
- Spider-phobics showed attentional capture by spiders
- But Doctor Who fans showed attentional capture by Doctor Who images
Familiarity/expertise can influence attention
Experts in American football faster to notice changes in football related images (Werner & Thies, 2010)
Expert musicians more distracted by musical instruments (Ro, Friggel & Lavie, 2009)
More recent theories highlight role of ‘selection history’ or reward associations.- history we have with particular things
Stimuli associated with value capture attention:
What was Andersons’ idea?
Put forward this idea that reward might be a third determinant of attention.
Anderson (2013)
Test and results
He tested this by training people to associate a colour with a reward (money)
Then they have a distractor phase- there are reward singletons- you’re looking for a shape and there is a distractor that has been associated with a reward
Found- People were distracted by reward the same way as they had been distracted by colour singletons
This goes with the idea that reward can factor attention
He suggested that value is a third determinant of attention
What conclusion was made?
“the fact that the existing models can all be captured within a single diagram is significant process”
Model with sensory register, feature maps, saliency computations and control state
dotted line is like stuff they disagree on and not dotted line and stuff they agree on.
There’s more agreement about How you can allocate attention to space (to different locations).
What might attention be determined by?
–Top-down goals
–‘Bottom-up’ properties of the stimuli
–Value/Selection History
