lecture 2 - attention and distraction

Question 1

the automatic and deliberate control of behaviour

Answer 1

• Not everything we see or hear enters ‘consciousness’ ie looking at something isn’t the same as ‘noticing’ it
  Can we decide what to pay attention to? Ie select one ‘message’ and suppress others

Question 2

the stroop task - J Ridley Stroop 1935

Answer 2

• Congruent list - where words of colour are that colour eg red is red
  
  • Control - xs of a colour
    Incongruent - words of colour are not that colour eg word blue is coloured green

the task has many variations

results In notes - ptps have a slower reaction time on the incongruent condition and the fasted reaction Time on the congruent condition. we are slower in incongruent as have to suppress the word meaning

Question 3

selective attention

Answer 3

• Process that controls our awareness of particular categories of events in our environment
  
  • Allows us to select one ‘message’ and suppress others
    Why do we need selective attention?

Question 4

Broadbent 1958

Answer 4

brain has limited capacity for conscious processing - can’t process everything that enters the brain - we would be overwhelmed. limited capacity and only hold certain amount of info in consciousness at a time.

Question 5

both examples of selective attention

Answer 5

• We appear not to process the background details while focusing on the card trick
  
  • But
    We don’t seem to be able to ignore the words when we’re trying to focus on the colour (the ‘stroop effect”

Question 6

The stroop effect

Answer 6

An experimental paradigm that allows us to study selective attention mechanisms
Stroop incongruent condition creates a situation where two attention processes are in conflict with each other (and hence allow us to measure their effect on each other)

Question 7

Attention can be controlled via automatic versus controlled processing

Answer 7

• Controlled (deliberate) processing
  Involves ‘mental effort’
  Limited (Broadbent, 1958)
  Subject to distraction
  • Automatic (obligatory) processing
    Happens independently of ‘effort’
    Causes distraction when incongruent with the focal task (and facilitation when congruent)

Question 8

psychology of attention

Answer 8

• We can study attention processes in tasks where they are in conflict with each other (Stroop incongruency c/w congruency or neutral trails)
  And in tasks where they help each other (Stroop congruency)

Question 9

Automatic processing for interacting with the environment

Answer 9

Task = is the object the right way up?
Yes/no response on keyboard with either right or left hand.
object action compatibility effect, in response latency, on the hand of response when classifying objects (such as in the cup example) that are orientated so as to have optimal hand of grasp (right hand in cup example). if your right handed your more likely to place a cup don with handle on right and vice versa so would look wrong to you the other way. usually hold with index finger.

picture in notes

Question 10

Why do we need attention?

Answer 10

• Enhanced processing of info falling within the ‘focus’ of attention (poster et al 1980)
  Focus of attention on context/ goal relevant information
• So that we don’t waste limited resources processing irrelevant information
  • We can ‘focus’ our attention to enhance processing of relevant information (attention as a ‘spotlight’)
    If attention enhances processing of the thing we’re attending to, what happens to the things we’re not attending to?

Question 11

‘Posner’ cueing paradigm

Answer 11

look at centre of screen then an arrow then centre plus. have to press left or right button on where target stimulus (digit) is on the screen.

• Congruent ‘endogenous’ cueing
  Interval between -> and appearance and disappearance of 5 too short to allow for eye movement. cues attention to the right so faster to detect 5 on right side. digit is in same direction as arrows.
  (‘Attending” not the same as ‘looking at”) (endogenous = voluntary attention direction)
  
  • Incongruent endogenous cueing
  • Congruent c/w incongruent ‘endogenous’ cueing ->3 <- 3
  • Response times (RTs) congruent < RTs incongruent

flash of light and then target appears. congruent target in same area as light. incongruent target is other side to flash of light. external cues.

- Congruent ‘exogenous’ cueing - exogenous = reflective automatic attention. Attention is drawn automatically towards stiumulus by external stimulus eg flashing light, noise etc. outside affects attention. 
- Incongruent ‘exogeneous’ cueing 
- Congruent c/w incongruent ‘exogenous’ cueing - +3 +3  Response times (RTs) congruent < RTs incongruent

people are faster in cued condition compared to non cued. shift attention to target location faster as faster processing there.

Question 12

brief recap

Answer 12

• Attention can be controlled via automatic and deliberate controlled processes
• We can study these processes in task conditions where they are in conflict (Stroop incongruency) or help each other (object-action compatibility)
  Both automatic and controlled processes can be biased by cues (Posner paradigm: exogenous/endogenous cueing effects)

Question 13

models of selective attention

Answer 13

• Early selection models: Items that are not attended to will not get selected for perceptual processing
  Late selection models: All information is attended to and gets selected lateron in processing chain

Question 14

‘early’ selection - Broadbent 1958

Answer 14

diagram in notes

limitations on processing

bottleneck is between selective filter and perceptual system. there is a limited capacity. selective filter is third step.

linear model but may not happen in parallel in brain.

• Their primary feature is that if items are not attended to they are not selected for perceptual analysis and so play no further part in information processing.
• However late selection models argue that all info is attended to and is only selected later in the info processing chain, after perceptual analysis of the stimuli.
• Most of the influential ESMs were developed in the 1950s and 1960s when organisational psychology was making large inroads into workforce behaviour. Psychologists such as Donald Broadbent were interested in how psychological principles could be applied to understanding real-life problems, such as operating air traffic control systems or navigating a plane, both of which require extraordinary attention and selective attention.
• Broadbent’s (1958) model of attention proposed a filter theory of attention which, suggested that processing information was like the operation of a filtering system, at the time it was popular as it was testable and falsifiable however evidence has shown that features of the model were incorrect.
• Filter theory = a channel of communication would process information and transmit this information to other cognitive systems for analysis.
• Broadbent suggested that the filter system initially processes information from a ‘sensory store’ and transfers it to other cognitive systems. This was an all-or-nothing model where only selected material would pass through the filter system. This selected material would then make its way to a limited capacity P(erceptual) system which would identify the material.
• The all-or-nothing feature of the model can explain why material presented to the unattended ear in dichotic listening experiments is not processed.
• Moray’s (1959) experiments suggested that the basic feature of Broadbent’s model was wrong.
• Moray found that when participants were instructed to switch attention from one ear to another during the experiment, they were able to do this when the instruction was along the lines of, ‘Robyn, switch ears.’ According to the model, this channel should have been blocked and remained unattended to: the participant should have been attending exclusively to another channel.
  Another set of experiments also demonstrated that listeners could follow messages that were switched from one ear to the other. For example, a narrative would begin in one ear and be switched to the previously unattended ear (Treisman, 1960, 1964). Participants, contrary to the filter model, would switch attention to the unattended ear to follow the narrative.

Question 15

‘late’ selection (deutsch and deutsch 1963)

Answer 15

limitations on responding.

attended and unattended info.

bottleneck is between selective filter and response as selective filter is second to last step.

Question 16

dichotic listening meaning

Answer 16

The first experiments to investigate the nature of attention scientifically took advantage of the fact that we have two ears.
- Selective attention is not achieved by simply closing a sensory channel. Some information can break through into consciousness due to its nature eg Moray (1959) found that people can hear and remember their name presented to the unattended ear or Nielsen and Sarason (1981) found that people tend to immediately notice sexually explicit words presented to the unattended ear.
- The fact that some types of information presented to the unattended ear can grab our attention indicates that even unattended information undergoes some verbal analysis.
- If the unattended information is ‘filtered out’ at some level, this filtration must not occur until after the sounds are identified as words.
- Several studies have shown that information presented to the unattended ear can affect our behaviour even if we do not become conscious of the information. the information can produce implicit memories, of which we are unaware (Cleermans, 1993)
Von Wright et al (1975) showed that words previously presented along with an unpleasant electrical shock would produce an emotional reaction when the words were presented to the unattended ear. Even when the participant was not consciously attending to the voice, the information produced a non-verbal response – a classically conditioned emotional reaction. Thus, the unattended information could trigger the recall of an implicit memory.

Question 17

dichotic listening (shadowing) experiment

Answer 17

devised by cherry 1953 - used to settle debate between early and late selection. you ignore inputs into right ear = unattended info. you attend the information into your left ear and say it aloud.

what happens to the unattended info and how would we know?

listeners can tell if unattended message is voice or noise, male or female ie relatively superficial, physical aspects of input. but can’t report anything that was said - even single words repeated many times, or even if it was in a foreign language.

McKay (1973) showed that information presented to the unattended ear can influence verbal processing even when the listener is not conscious of this information.

in a later recall test - asked did you hear the sentence “ they threw stones at the side of the river?’ or “they threw stones at the building society?”.
they answer the river which means the meaning of non-attended message was processed as
they received the ignored inputs of ‘river, flood, swim’ and attended input ‘they threw stones towards the bank’. so their answer is congruent with meaning of ambiguous word

however the answer you get depends on how you measure your dependent variable

Question 18

attenuation model - treisman 1964

Answer 18

the model is a compromise - diagram in notes. weakened processing of unattended information.

bottleneck is between attenuating filter and selective filter.

unattended information is weakened. physical features are filtered out in attenuating filter. in perceptual system a dictionary unit - meaning extraction - processing of unattended input depends on threshold.

attention system more flexible and dynamic

• Treisman (1960) showed that people can follow a message that is being shadowed even if it switches from one ear to the other. Suppose a person is shadowing a message presented to the left ear, while the message to the right ear is unshadowed. Apparently, the switch occurs when the message begins to make no sense.
  However, by the time the person realises that ‘crept out of flowers’ makes no sense, the rest of the message, ‘the swamp’, has already been presented to the right ear. Because the person is able to continue the message without missing any words, he or she must be able to retrieve some words from memory. Thus, even though an unshadowed message cannot be remembered later, it produces some trace that can be retrieved if attention is directed to it soon after the words are presented.

Question 19

How do we know that unattended information is processed?

Answer 19

• Dichotic listening studies have shown that un-
  attended channel can influence responses
  (auditory modality)
  Priming studies have shown that unattended information can influence responses (visual modality)

Question 20

priming

Answer 20

• Exposure to one stimulus influences the processing of a subsequent target stimulus without conscious guidance or intention
• Positive priming: Enhances processing of target (faster naming times, less errors)
  Negative priming: Inhibits processing of target (slower naming times, more errors)

Question 21

negative priming

Answer 21

task in notes
name black word (target) and ignore grey word (unattended distractor)

there is also a separate study of target facilitation and distractor suppression processes - task is to read red letter and ignore green letter. distractor inhibition - baseline - target facilitation. measure response times/ errors

Metzler and Parkin 2000 - frontal lobe patients show positive instead of negative priming - deficits in distractor suppression not target facilitation.

Negative priming
* Unattended information influences subsequent responding i.e. must have been processed to a certain degree
* Treisman (1964): Attenuation model:
Unattended material is processed in a weakened, attenuated form

Question 22

adaptive significance and the control of behaviour

Answer 22

the ‘cocktail party effect’ - cherry 1958

sometimes people hear their names being mentioned .

we want a system that responds to significant events even when were not ‘paying attention’ to them

• Selective attention to auditory messages has practical significance beyond the laboratory For example, sometimes we have to sort out one message from several others without the benefit of such a distinct cue; we seldom hear one voice in one ear and another voice in the other. We might be trying to converse with one person while we are in a room with several other people who are carrying on their own conversations. We can usually sort out one voice from another eg the cocktail-party phenomenon.
• In this case, we are trying to listen to the person opposite us and to ignore the cross-conversation of the people to our left and right. Our ears receive a jumble of sounds, but we are able to pick out the ones we want, stringing them together into a meaningful message and ignoring the rest. This task takes some effort; following one person’s conversation in such circumstances is more difficult when what they are saying is not very interesting. If we overhear a few words of another conversation that seems more interesting, it is hard to strain out the cross-conversation.
• The cocktail-party effect study was reported in 1959 by Moray.
• The laboratory finding seemed to mirror that of hearing one’s name mentioned in someone else’s conversation at a party even though you were not attending to that conversation
• Only 33 per cent of participants responded to the cocktail-party effect in Moray’s study.
• Is there a psychological difference between those who attend and those who do not and would such a difference reflect different means of processing auditory or cognitive information?
• Working memory could be the difference between those who attend and those who do not. Conway et al hypothesized that the least capable participants identified their names because they failed to demonstrate the working memory facility which would allow them to attend to the channel they were meant to be attending to and ignore the channel they were not meant to attend to.
  Participants in the experiment were asked to complete a selective listening exercise similar to that of Moray. Participants listened to messages through headphones but were told only to attend to one channel; the participant’s name would occur in the unattended channel. Participants also completed a working memory exercise that involved reading a simple mathematical equation followed by a word (e.g. ‘Is (6 + 4) / 2 = 5? DOG’), solving the equations and, at the end of all trials, writing down as many of the presented words as they could remember. The number of equation and word displays in each trial varied between two and six. Those who excelled at this task were significantly better at ignoring their name than were those who performed less well.

Question 23

recap what happens to unattended information

Answer 23

• Early versus Late Selection Models
• Dichotic listening and negative priming experiments to study processing of unattended information
• Attenuation model as compromise

Selective attention as a balancing act
* No all-or-nothing system; not as simple as early versus late attention -> Treisman’s Attentuation model
* We need to focus on the context-relevant information to enhance processing
* But we also need to be flexible, if new, significant (dangerous) information comes along
* Distraction may be a ‘good’ thing in some types of setting
e.g., does the Stroop Effect reveal a flaw or a strength in our processing system?

Question 24

key issues

Answer 24

• Attention not the same as seeing, hearing, etc.
• Automatic and controlled processing
• We can create laboratory tasks where these processes oppose or help each other to study them
• We’re limited
  
  • ‘Focussing’ attention enhances processing, but it’s not impervious to distraction
  • What happens to unattended information (and, importantly, how would we know?)
• Where do the limitations on processing arise?
  
  • i.e., at what point does selection take place?
    What is attention for (what does it enable/prevent)?

Question 25

Philosophical approaches to consciousness

Answer 25

• Historically there are 3 philosophical positions about the nature of consiousness (Block et al 1997).
• 1 = consciousness is not a natural phenonmenon - not subject to the laws of nature that all scientists attempt to discover, laws involving matter and purely physical forces. The position states that consciousness is something supernatural and miraculous, not to be understood by the human mind.
• 2 = consciouness is a natural phenonmenon but for various reasons we cannot understand it. Consiousness exists because of nature of human brain but its not known how it occurs. We can’t understand consciousness because our brains are not capable of doing so. It needs a more complex brain than ours to understand the biology of subjective awareness. Alternative view = everything can be explained including all aspects of the human brain but consciousness is a vague, poorly operationally defined term.
  3 = people are conscious and this is produced by the activity of the human brain and we should be optimistic about our ability to understand this phenomenon (Crick 1994).

Question 26

Meaning of ‘consciousness’

Answer 26

• Its a private experience which cannot be shared directly. We experince our own consiciousness not others consiousness. We conclude others are consious as they are like us and they can tell us that they are. This has a subjective quality so makes consiousness difficult to study scientifically.
• According to Velmans (2009), ‘the term means different things to many different people; there is no universally agreed “core meaning”’.
• Chalmers (1995) suggests researchers face easy problems and a hard problem. Easy problems = ability to discriminate, categorise and react to stimuli, to intergrate info by using a cognitive system, to report mental states and to access internal states, to control behaviour delibrately and to differentiate between wakefulness and sleep. These are all associated with consiousness but chalmers thinks they are easy topics of consiousness as they primarily involve the contents of consiousness - theses features refer to functions or abilities.
• Understanding (or discovering) the neural correlates of consciousness is also an easy problem, according to Chalmers. A mental state is said to be conscious when this state can be verbally reportable or internally accessible; the organism is able to be conscious of some information, react to it and explain it. This is another easy problem.
• The hard problem lies in studying the experience of these mental events. Whne we report these mental events we have an experience of reporting these mental events. There must be something ‘that it is like’ to be conscious (Nagel, 1974); there is a subjective quality about it and because of this, it poses a difficult problem. These conscious experiences are sometimes referred to as phenomenal consciousness or ‘qualia’.
• Easy problems = understanding the functions and neurophysiology of consciousness
  Hard problem = explaining why we have the experience of consciousness in the first place

Question 27

Theories of consciousness

Answer 27

Neurobiological theories
- Consciousness arises from the neural activity of the brain.
- These theories derive their data from several sources eg neuroimaging and brain damage - and other branches of natural science, such as mathematics and quantum physics.
Each type of study has a different perspective on the neural correlarates of consiousness

Question 28

Consciousness and brain damage

Answer 28

• Brain damage can alter human consciousness eg patients with anterograde amnesia are unable to form new verbal memories but can learn some kinds of tasks but are unaware they have learned something even when their behaviour indicates that they have.
• Brain damage does not prevent all kinds of learning but does prevent conscious awareness of what has been learned.
• Those who have damaged the posterior parts of the brain show a lack of awareness of stimuli presented to their visual field. Brain damage that impairs the perception of visual stimuli seems to also impair the ability.
• Blindsight patients have damage to the primary visual cortex and they can perform some visual tasks they report being unaware of the task stimuli that had been presented in their visual field.
• Individuals with certain types of agnosia are unable to recognise objects or may be unable to ascribe meaning to such objects. Another form of agnosia is characterised by the inability to identify familiar faces by using facial cues alone. All these disorders involve some lack of awareness and may help us to understand the regional contribution of the brain to conscious awareness.
  Blindsight patients, have damage to an area called V1, the primary visual cortex. This is the region in the brain to which information from the retina travels.

Question 29

Does the activity of V1 reflect conscious awareness of visual stimuli?

Answer 29

Crick and Koch (1995) have proposed the controversial idea that it does not. They argue that it is not involved in conscious visual perception because V1 does not directly project to the frontal cortex (which integrates information from other parts of the cortex); the areas surrounding V1, however – the extrastriate cortex – do, and it is the activity of these areas which may reflect conscious processing. Crick and Koch (1995) admit that this is a subtle and speculative proposal and have not undertaken an empirical test of this hypothesis.

Question 30

split- brain surgery

Answer 30

• Brain damage from the surgcial procedure to releive symptoms of epilepsy which gives rise to split-brain patients or callosal syndrome - bogen 1993. neurosurgeons severe the corpus callosum to stop seizures occuring which is when violent storms of neural activity shift from one hemisphere to another via the corpus callosum. The patienst are therefore ‘split-brain’ to reduce the frequency of the seizures - sperry et al 1969.
• Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga and their associates (Gazzaniga, 1970, 1998; Gazzaniga et al, 1996; Sperry, 1966) pioneered research into the psychological consequences of split-brain surgery. Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his work on neurosurgery. Their work, initially with cats, demonstrated that the cerebral cortex of the left and right hemispheres normally exchange information via the corpus callosum. With one exception, each hemisphere receives sensory information from the opposite side of the body and controls muscular movements on that side The corpus callosum allows these activities to be coordinated, so that each hemisphere ‘knows’ what is going on in the other hemisphere (Hoptman and Davidson, 1994; Banich, 1995).
• After split-brain surgery, the two hemispheres of the brain operate independently and do not exchange information.
• The effects of these disconnections are not immediately obvious to a casual observer.
• The right hemisphere of an epileptic person with a split-brain can understand speech but is poor at reading and spelling.
• Only the left hemisphere in most people controls speech.
• Broca’s speech area is located in the left hemisphere, making the right hemisphere incapable of producing speech.
• Split-brain patients may experience alien hand, where their left hand seems to have a mind of its own eg patients may find themselves putting down a book held in the left hand even if they are reading it with great interest. The right hemisphere controls the movements of the left hand, leading to unexpected movements that puzzle the left hemisphere. One hypothesis suggests that the inhibition of actions organised elsewhere, but originating in the frontal cortex, is lost in split-brain patients, hence the appearance of unusual, uninhibited behaviour in one hand. One hypothesis suggests that the inhibition of actions organised elsewhere, but originating in the frontal cortex, is lost in split-brain patients, hence the appearance of unusual, uninhibited behaviour in one hand.
• Intermanual conflict refers to the apparently contradictory activity of the left and right hands. - Akelaitis 1944/45
• When using their right hand to duplicate a geometrical design, split-brain patients often struggle and may be brushed aside by the left hand controlled by the right hemisphere.
• The ability of speech mechanisms in the left hemisphere to receive information from other regions of the brain is crucial for consciousness as demonstrated by the effects of cutting the corpus callosum. If this communication is interupted then some kinds of information never reach consciousness.
• The degree to which split-brain patients can make decisions about stimuli presented to the left or right of their visual field may depend on the part of the corpus callosum damaged: normally, not all of the corpus callosum is cut, only parts of it (Sergent, 1987, 1990, 1991).
• In one study, two out of three patients when presented with circles in each hemifield could indicate which was bigger (Sergent, 1987).
• There are other connections between the hemispheres aswell as the corpus callosum. Such patients may be able to undertake these tasks because of subcortical transfer, ipsilateral motor control, or communication via behavioural cues.
  Corballis et al (2018) note that there are many intact commissures, even cortical and cerebellar ones (Nomi et al, 2019), in split-brain patients. Perhaps it is the number of commissures that is cut that may be important (de Haan et al, 2020).

Question 31

Cricks astonishing hypothesis

Answer 31

• Crick’s theory (Cricks 1944) suggests that consciousness is the result of the activity of collections of neurons called neural assemblies = the astonishing hypothesis
• The behaviour of neurones is represented by 35–75 Hz oscillations in the cortex which form the basis of consciousness and correlates with awareness in different sensory modalities. The theory suggests oscillation represents the way in which the information we process is bound.
• Binding is important in consciousness and is the process whereby separate pieces of information about a single entity are brought together and used for processing later. (Chalmers 1995) eg bringing info together about colour and shape to form an image of an object.
• Crick argues neural groups will oscillate in the same space and time when elements are bound together.
  Crick’s theory has had attention and credit for tying consciousness to specific brain activity but has been criticised for not being able to explain the importance of these oscillations.

Question 32

Penrose’s and Hameroff’s quantum models

Answer 32

• Penrose’s (1989, 1994) model of consciousness relies on understanding quantum physics.
• Quantum physics suggests that events are observable and follow a logical order and are altered by being observed, which is known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
• Hameroff and Penrose (1996) and Hameroff (1998) have suggested that consciousness takes place in the skeletal structure of neurons (called cytoskeleton), specifically in parts of the neuron called microtubules.
• Hameroffs ideas are based of him being an anaesthetist and the process of anasthesia which induces loss of consciousness - Under general anaesthetic, individuals should not be able to move purposefully in response to a painful stimulus and should not be able to follow verbal commands. There is some controversial evidence that patients may be capable of remembering
• In Hameroff’s specific model of consciousness Microtubules are essential to consciousness as they transport material inside the neuron and define the shape of the processes that they inhabit so serve an important neural function.
• Hameroff’s specific model of consciousness suggests that quantum events occur in or around these microtubules and these events give rise to our conscious experience.
• The model can be criticised on the same grounds as Crick’s as it does not explain why such neural events should be associated with consciousness.
• Churchland (1998) has suggested that microtubules might just as well be called pixie dust in the synapses – essence which magically gives rise to consciousness.
• Hameroff (1998) has argued that the mechanism by which microtubules give rise to consciousness is detailed and not as vague as pixie dust.
  If these oscillations give rise to conscious experience, this is exactly Chalmers’s ‘hard’ problem,

Question 33

Cognitive theories

Answer 33

Cognitive theories of consciousness, do recognise consciousness arises from the activity of the brain but describe the way in which consciousness occurs in mentalistic, cognitive terms.

Question 34

Baar’s global workspace theory (1988, baars et al 1998) -

Answer 34

• The global workspace theory states that the contents of consciousness are contained in a central processor called a global workspace which is used to mediate the activity of non-conscious processes.
• When such processes need to inform the rest of the system, they send information to the workspace, which is a little like a blackboard used by the rest of the system (Baars et al, 1998).
  The model can explain how different types of conscious information are available to us but does not explain why this info in the global workspace is experienced so does not solve the ‘hard’ problem - Chalmers 1995

Question 35

Dennett’s multiple drafts

Answer 35

• Dennett’s theory proposes that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon that occurs in exactly the same way whenever it is evoked.
• Dennett debunks the mind-body interactionism proposed by Descartes.
• The notion of cartesian theatre where mind and body are interacting protagonists is untenable according to Dennett instead he argues consciousness is not a theatre its the activation of revised collections of sensory information called ‘drafts’.
• Because sensory information is received in various forms and at various times conscious experience is an updating, constantly revising process.
• Therefore Conscious experiences result from multiple drafts of sensory information which are assembled at particular points in time.
  One criticism of dennetts theory is that, although it seems to abolish the notion of the Cartesian theatre, he is replacing it with many theatres

Question 36

Shanon’s theory

Answer 36

• Shanon’s (1990,1998) theory claims that consciousness is not unitary and involves three components: sensed being, mental awareness, and reflection.
• Sensed being distinguishes between animate and living, and inanimate and dead
• mental awareness refers to the idea that we are aware of thoughts that pass through our heads, that is, we are aware of the contents of consciousness
• reflection refers to the idea that we are aware of our mental computations and that these ‘mentations’ can be the subject of future ‘mentations’.
• According to Shanon, there are two types of reflection: meta-observation which reflects on the content of mental states, and monitoring or control which checks and evaluates thoughts; this control guides or governs our thinking process.
• According to Shanon, mental awareness is the core of consciousness whereas sensed being is a prerequisite and reflection is derived from it.
• Shanon’s theory is difficult to test as the components are vaguely and generally described. It is also open to the criticism that it is too descriptive and explains very little.
  Pierson & Triut argue that the ultimate function of consciousness is to enable volitional movement.

Question 37

Selective attention

Answer 37

• We do not become conscious of all the stimuli detected by our sensory organs.
• The process that controls our awareness of particular categories of events in the environment is called selective attention.
• Sensory memory receives more information than it can transfer into short-term (working) memory.
• Sperling (1960) found that although people could remember about 4 or 5 of the 9 letters he flashed onto the screen if they tried to remember them all they could direct their attention to any of the three lines of letters contained in sensory memory and identify them with perfect accuracy.
• Selective attention serves to determine which events we become conscious of.
• Attention may be controlled automatically, as when an intense stimulus captures our attention, it may be controlled by instructions, or controlled by the demands of the task we are performing.
• Our attentional mechanisms serve to enhance our responsiveness to certain stimuli and to tune out irrelevant information.
• We sometimes miss something important because our attention is occupied elsewhere.
• According to Broadbent (1958) the brain mechanisms responsible for conscious processing of this information have a limited capacity. There is only so much information that these mechanisms can handle at one moment. Thus, we need a system to serve as a gatekeeper, controlling the flow of information to this system.
• The nature of this gatekeeper - selective attention - is the subject of ongoing research.
  Our ability to detect the number of voices in a group is limited; we can usually identify no more than three - Vitevitch and siew 2016

Question 38

background noise

Answer 38

• exclusion of auditory information has great practical implications.
• Background noise is common in office environments and is a source of interference in open-plan offices (Klitzman and Stellman 1989)
• Studies report that background office noise is associated with stress and lack of concentration, low levels of performance and reduced employee efficiency (Loewen and Suedfeld, 1992; Sundstrom et al, 1994).
• Background noise does not interfere with every type of behaviour eg Music played in the background may even improve our performance.
• Are there specific auditory stimuli, therefore, that selectively impair the performance of specific tasks?
• For example, Salame and Baddely (1982) have suggested that performance on a cognitive task can only be disrupted if the disruptive auditory stimulus is speech.
• others have suggested that stimuli other than speech can affect performance, giving rise to what has been termed the irrelevant speech effect (LeCompte et al, 1997). The irrelevant speech effect suggests that any disruptive sound (delivered at conversational level) can impair memory for verbal material during serial (that is, when the material has to be recalled in a specific order) and free recall (Salame and Baddeley, 1990; Jones, 1995).
• Smith-Jackson and Kline conducted an experiment to discover whether irrelevant speech modified these responses.They set up an experiment in which participants completed a verbal task at a desk while irrelevant speech played behind them. In one condition, the speech was a conversation between two men; in another, the conversation of one person with pauses (as if talking on the telephone). The presence of irrelevant speech was associated with making a greater number of errors and longer completion rates.
• An alternative to the speech effect is that the change state hypothesis that states noise which disrupts performance has to show some variation (rather than being speech-like) before recall is disrupted. (Jones et al 1992).
  Banbury and Berry (1998) found that office noise with speech and speech alone had a detrimental effect on memory for a prose passage whereas individuals in the office noise without speech condition performed no differently to a control group, suggesting that the speech component of the noise was important. All three noise conditions, however, were associated with deficits in arithmetic performance.

Question 39

mobile phone use

Answer 39

• Some early research suggested that the use of smartphones may not be advantageous for other behaviours such as academic performance, for example, especially among school children.
• The dependency and the distraction, it seems, had a negative effect on a range of variables.
• A study of over 2,000 middle and high school students found that smartphone dependency predicted poor maths and language performance (Seo et al, 2016); one study reported that when schools banned phones, academic low achievers were found to perform better (but high achievers’ performance did not change) (Beland & Murphy, 2016).
• However, the results are not universal. Other studies find no detrimental use of smartphone use on academic performance, whereas some find no negative effect on learning but negative effects on non-academic outcomes (Lau, 2017).
• One view argues that phones are so ubiquitous that their effects on any variable – unless directly related to the immediate environment – is negligible.
• Many of these studies, of course, have different outcomes and all are correlational; they use one variable to predict another (because there is no way of experimentally inducing dependency in any way that is meaningful).
  A meta-analysis of the relationship between smartphone use and academic performance over the 10 years from 2008–2017 found that the effect of the former on the latter was very small, even where it did occur (Kates et al, 2018). The researchers also suggested another reason for any relationship a study is likely to find; perhaps those students who are more likely to use their phones/be dependent on them may be less likely to achieve compared to students who are not.

Question 40

visual information

Answer 40

• Sperling’s studies of sensory memory show the role of attention in selectively transferring visual information into verbal short-term memory/ into consciousness.
  Posner et al (1980) studied this phenomenon in detail and had participants watch a computer-controlled video display screen as a small mark in the centre of the screen served as a fixation point for the participants’ gaze.
  They were shown a warning stimulus near the fixation point followed by a target stimulus – a letter displayed to the left or the right of the fixation point.
  The warning stimulus consisted of either an arrow pointing right or left or simply a plus sign. The arrows served as cues to the participants to expect the letter to occur either to the right or to the left. The plus sign served as a neutral stimulus, containing no spatial information. The participants’ task was to press a button as soon as they detected the letter.
• Eighty per cent of the time, the arrow accurately pointed towards the location in which the letter would be presented and 20 per cent of the time, the arrow pointed away from the location in which it would occur.
• The advance warning clearly had an effect on the participants’ response times: when they were correctly informed of the location of the letter, they responded faster.
• Study shows selective attention can influence the detection of visual stimuli - if a stimulus occurs where we expect it, we perceive it more quickly; if it occurs where we do not expect it, we perceive it more slowly. Thus, people can follow instructions to direct their attention to particular locations in the visual field. Because gaze remained fixed on the centre of the screen in this study, this movement of attention was independent of eye movement.
• How does this focusing of attention work neurologically? The most likely explanation seems to be that neural circuits that detect a particular kind of stimulus are somehow sensitised, so that they can more easily detect that stimulus. In this case, the mechanism of selective attention sensitised the neural circuits that detect visual stimuli in a particular region.

Question 41

Inattentional blindness

Answer 41

• Inattentional blindness is a phenomenon where we fail to perceive visual stimuli when our attention is drawn elsewhere. (Mack and Rock 1998).
• Inattentional blindness is similar to change blindness, where participants fail to notice changes in stimuli if their attention is directed elsewhere.
• The inattentional blindness effect can occur in extraordinary contexts, such as a man in a gorilla suit walking across a basketball game screen while ptps count how many passes of the ball are made they don’t notice the gorilla.
  The advert is based on an actual experiment designed and conducted by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (Simons and Chabris, 1999). The audience behaved as the participants in their study behaved and the inattentional blindness was seen for a man who walked across the screen carrying an umbrella and even for the gorilla when it walked along the screen, stopped in the middle, turned to face the front, thumped its chest, turned and walked to the other side of the screen. This segment took nine seconds. The whole film lasted 62 seconds.

Question 42

divided attention - single -capacity models

Answer 42

• Various models have sought to explain divided attention and how we can (or, more often, cannot) undertake many tasks all at once.
• Single-capacity models, for example, suggest that there is one pool of resources available to deal with perceptual and cognitive challenges (Kahneman, 1973). The more tasks an individual undertakes, the less capacity will be left to undertake these tasks effectively because each task is competing for the same pool of resources. Resources are, then, normally allocated to the most important task.
• Single-capacity model theorists have found some support for this proposition in dual-task experiments (performing two tasks simultaneously). When this occurs, performance on both tasks diminishes.
• The results suggest that when the resources necessary to complete tasks exceed the available single capacity, then performance will deteriorate.
  However, not all evidence supports this view. Experiments in which typists were asked to transcribe text and complete a shadowing task at the same time found the participants were able to do this effectively (Shaffer, 1975). Sometimes, two tasks can be performed as well as one can.

Question 43

divided attention - multiple resource models

Answer 43

• An alternative model is the multiple resource models which argue we have several resource pools to deal with various cognitive and perceptual processes. It is because of these various pools that we can divide our attention between tasks successfully.
• These models suggest that when two tasks compete for the same resource, this will result in an impairment in task performance. When tasks compete for different resource pools, then they should be performed successfully.
  A problem with the resource model, however, is operationally defining a resource and the types of tasks that would use the different ‘resources’. There is no general agreement on what the different types of resources are.

Question 44

divided attention - concerns the processes involved in various tasks.

Answer 44

• For example, Johnston and Heinz (1978) suggest that selective and divided attention clearly requires some form of selection. They divide the type of selection required into early (selecting perceptual/sensory information) and late (selecting meaning).
• Their process model does not agree that there is one structure or system which allows attention. It argues that early selection uses less capacity than late selection.
• To test this hypothesis, they asked participants to undertake a dichotic listening task where the stimuli differed in terms of their physical features (perceptual) or in terms of their meaning (semantic). Concurrently, the participants undertook a reaction time task in which they had to press a button as soon as a light appeared.
• The experimenters found that although reaction time was slower when the participants listened to two messages, less capacity was required when the messages differed perceptually (such as the speaker’s voice).
• Only around 46 per cent of people report remembering any banner ads when they are asked to recall what was on a webpage they visited (Dreze and Hussherr, 2003).
• Lapa (2007) found that over time, people learned where the location of the banners were and so avoided them on subsequent visits. However, even when the locations were randomised, people only fixated on them around 11 per cent of the time (Burke et al, 2005).
• Would horizontal ads at the top of the page be better noticed than skyscraper ads going down the side of a page? And would an animated advert be better than a static one? The answer is that people fixate more on the skyscraper-type ad along the right-hand side of the page, especially if it is animated (Kuisma et al, 2010; Simola et al, 2011).
  A single animation was better than multiple animations.Animation reduces fixation on a horizontal ad. If an advert appears suddenly, people fixate on it for longer than if the advert appeared after around 12 seconds (Simola et al, 2011).

Question 45

Brain mechanisms of selective attention

Answer 45

• The left and right cerebral hemispheres seem to play different roles in attention.
• Focal attention (which involves attention to local cues) appears to rely on the left hemisphere, whereas global attention (a holistic approach which takes in whole objects or scenes) relies on the right hemisphere (Fink et al, 1996).
• This asymmetry of function may explain the symptoms seen in the perceptual disorder, spatial neglect, in which brain-injured (usually right-hemisphere-damaged) patients are unable to report or respond to stimuli contralateral to the side of the brain injury.
• Sustained attention has been associated with increased activation in the right prefrontal and parietal cortices, based on PET and fMRI findings, but generally there is a network of regions traversing the right fronto-parietal regions that are involved in sustained attention (Coull et al, 1996).
• However, there is also evidence that the brain can adapt to what it sees, that is, after initial firing, this firing is reduced with repeated presentation of a stimulus. Thus, brain activation, measured via fMRI, is reduced when the same face or object is presented to the participant but recovers when the stimulus undergoes a modest transformation (Grill-Spector, 2009).
• This increase and decrease appears to be associated with the firing of the inferotemporal neurons.
• Selective attention has been associated with increases in activation in posterior regions, but the region of activation depends on the type of attention that is selectively applied.
• If one sensory modality is attended to, regions associated with other modalities show suppressed activation (Haxby et al, 1994; Ghatan et al, 1998).
• Divided attention also recruits the prefrontal cortex (PFC), especially the left (Vandenberghe et al, 1997; Benedict et al, 1998).
• Posner and Petersen (1990) have characterised the ability to shift attention in three ways: the first component of attention allows the disengagement of attention from its current location (a function of the posterior parietal cortex); the second guides attention from the current location to the new location (a function of the superior colliculus, frontal eye fields and related structures); the third component allows the re-engagement of attention to the new location (a function of the thalamus).
  There is evidence that the lateral intraparietal area increases when people increase their attention to spatial locations and that an increase in the intraparietal sulcus is seen when people voluntarily direct attention to a location (Yantis, 2008).