Lecture 04 Attention Flashcards
Attention
- Information is SELECTED for further processing
- Other information is DISCARDED
- LIMITED capacity to process all received information, so selection based on relevance or importance to current GOALS
Domain of Attention
- Directed to locations in space
- Space is a common dimension of different sensory systems and our motor system
– Spotlight metaphor - Attention may be needed to bind together different aspects of conscious perception
- e.g. shape and color, sound and vision
The Spotlight Metaphor of Attention
Spotlight –> salient object
1. Move e.g. in visual search
2. Zoom in or out (narrow or wide “beam”), e.g. if attending to words or attending to central letter in a word
3. Location of attention not necessarily same as eye fixation (“looking out corner of one’s eyes”)
Why shouldn’t spotlight metaphor be taken too literally?
(e.g. possible to split attention between 2 non-adjacent locations)
Orienting
- Covert orienting
- Overt orienting
Overt Attention
“Giving attention to something”
Eye movements, attention, and perception
- Saccades: rapid movements of the eyes from one place to another
- Fixations: short pauses on points of interest
- Studied by using an eye tracker
Bottom-Up Determinants of Eye Movement
Stimulus Salience
Stimulus Salience
Areas that stand out and capture attention
- Bottom-up process
- Depends on characteristics of the stimulus
- Color and motion are highly salient
Top-Down Determinants of Eye Movements
Eye movements are led by the person’s goal
- Scene schema
Scene Schema
- Knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes
- Help guide fixations from one area of a scene to another
- Eyes movements are determined by task
- Eyes movements preceded motor actions by a fraction of a second
Covert Attention
“Attention Without Eye Movements”
- Precueing: directing attention without moving the eyes
- Participants respond faster to a light at an expected location than at an unexpected location
- Even when eyes kept fixed
Precueing
Directing attention without moving the eyes
- Precue help without a person knowing
- If a person focus on a specific location they tend to process it faster
Exogenous Orienting
Attention from external cue
- Automatic
- Posner’s Reflexive attention experiments
Endogenous Orienting
Attention from internal cue
- Controlled (Motivated)
- Posner’s Voluntary attention experiments
What Controls the Spotlight?
Exogenous orienting slightly more than Endogenous orienting in Posner’s task
Types of Attention
- Selective
- Divided
- Distractors
- Attentional capture
- Scanning
Selective Attention
Attending to one thing while ignoring others
Divided Attention
Paying attention to more than one thing at a time
Distractors
Stimulus that is interfering with the processing of another stimulus
Attentional Capture
Rapid shifting of attention
Visual Scanning
Movements of the eyes from one location to another
Dichotic Listening Task
Attending to one ear and shadowing
What can be processed at another ear?
- Own name
- Gender
- Change in gender
- Change in tone
Cocktail Party Effect
Hearing one’s own name at a party while being unattended
Selective Attention Models
- Early Selection Model
- Intermediate Selection Model
- Late Selection Model
Early Selection Model
Broadbent Filter Model of Attention
Sensory memory -> Filter -> Detector -> Short-term memory
- Only attended messages pass through the filter
Criticism of Filter Model
- Cocktail party phenomenon
- “Dear Aunt Jane” at the unattended ear
Intermediate Selection Model
Treisman’s Attenuation Model (Leaky Filter Model)
Messages -> Attenuator -> Dictionary unit -> Short-term memory
- At the attenuator: Attended messages pass through with stronger strength than unattended messages
-
Late Selection Model
MacKay
- Selection of stimuli for final processing does not occur until after information has been analyzed for meaning
- “They were throwing stones at the bank”
- Meaning of the biasing word affected participants’ choice
Load Theory of Attention
Load = The difficulty of a given task
Memory set
One to four characters called target stimuli
Divided Attention
Remembering target and monitoring rapidly presented stimuli
Test frames
Could contain random dot patterns, a target, distractors
Inattentional Blindness
Unattended stimuli are left out
Feature Integration Theory (FIT)
How we perceive individual features as part of the same object by proposing a two-stage process?
1. Preattentive stage
2.Focused attention stage
Preattentive stage
- Automatic
- No effort or attention
- Unaware of process
- Object analyzed into features
Focused attention stage
- Attention plays key role
- Features are combined
Illusory Conjunctions
Combination of features from different stimuli
R.M.: Patient with Balint’s syndrome
- Parietal lobe damage
- Inability to focus attention on individual object
- Illusory conjunctions
- “blue T”
Feature Search (a.k.a. Disjunctive Search)
- Color, shape, orientation, or size
- Bottom-up processing
- Unaffected by number of distractors
Serial Search (a.k.a. Conjunction Search)
- Scanning to focus attention at a specific location
- Top-down processing
- eliminating stimuli
Evidence for Feature Integration Theory (FIT)
“Pop-out” is not affected by number of items to be searched
