lecture 5 - Attention as filter

Question 1

attention as a television set

Answer 1

-million channels (breathing as one but you can tune it out)
-infinite channels, but you only tune in to certain ones

Question 2

focus experiments

Answer 2

1 - change blindness
first one was told to look at centre and then next time left to spot differences

2 - inattentional blindness - gorilla video

“Looking isn’t the same as seeing. You have to focus attention on something in order to become aware of it.”
– Dan Simons

Question 3

william james -

Answer 3

–interested in philosphy, analysing contents of the mind etc

Question 4

what is the cocktail party problem

Answer 4

the task of hearing a sound of interest, often a speech signal, in this sort of complex auditory setting
-in a busy party and you tune out all other convos

Question 5

dichotic listening - cherry 1953
-can they report one message
-what happens to the content from other ear

Answer 5

participant simultaneously listening to different acoustic events presented to each ear (two different messages )
Playing two recorded messages simultaneously sounds like babbling, unless the content is very distinct.

• When messages are played one in each ear, we can easily “shadow” one

What happens to the content in the unattended ear? People can’t report:

• Changes in language
• Playing recording backward
• Any content

They do notice
* If the messages becomes the same in both ears
* A change in the voice’s gender

Question 6

what are the key features of attention (cherry paper)

Answer 6

-limited capacity ; can’t take to much perceptual input (two messages at the same time) limit what we can process at any given time. what drives limitation

-selection ; participants select to tune out one and listen to other message : there is an ability to select

-modulation; when attending one ear and suppressing the other one, the actual perceptual signal coming into the ears is the same (same physical signal) but something has changed: signal has been modulated on a way that people are able to process one and not able to report anything about the other one

-vigilance; what kind of things have the power to disrupt your maintenance of that sort of attentional stream ?

Question 7

what are varieties of attention

Answer 7

Endogenous
vs Exogenous

Covert vs
Overt

Other
divisions

Question 8

endogenous vs exogenous attention

Answer 8

Endogenous => controlled or
modulated by internal goals.
* AKA top-down, voluntary
-attention that you pay to things when they are relevant to what your trying to do- etc attention i give to assignments
-

• Exogenous => controlled or
  modulated by external events.
• AKA bottom-up, reflexive,
  involuntary
  -aren’t relevant to current task but catch your attention/ disrupt focus

important to have both (imagine being dangerously focused and not knowing anything else going on)
* The balance between these
is important.

Question 9

covert vs overt attention

Answer 9

Overt = Observable by others. Accompanied by head or eye
movement. can tell what your praying attention to by seeing where your looking etc

• Covert = Not directly observable by others; “out of the corner of one’s eye”

eg imagine being in a library and your working on a paper but out the corner of your eye et your paying attention to the conversation next to you
-overtly looks like your paying attention to your paper, but covertly your paying attention to the conversation next to you.
eg overt attention - check rear veiw mirror

• Obviously, a close relationship exists between eye movements and
  attention! Exactly how close? I reviewed this issue recently;
  (optional!) reference in the extra reading folder.

Question 10

types of attention
cross 2 by tow matrix

Answer 10

can have a cross of 2 by 2 (table)
-endogenous and overt, endogenous and covert ,
exogenous and overt, exogenous and covert

-eg tennis coach tells you to keep your eye on the ball
-that would be overt and endogenous

-if there was a car behind you distracted you and yiu missed the ball
-exogenous , overt

Question 11

failures to attend
-engineering problem

Answer 11

“Driver looked-but-failed-to-see
(LBFS) errors (bikers call it
“SMIDSY”) ‘sorry mate I didnt see you’

quite a vital issue

• Mobile phone use during driving,
  walking, etc.
• Competitive sports examples –
  distraction and misdirection
• Pay attention to your attention, you will be surprised!

Question 12

what are the three models of attention

Answer 12

-attention as filter (Boroadbent,1958)

-attention as spotlight (Posner, 1980)

-attention as glue (Treisman 1980)

Question 13

BROAD BEN T’S SELECTIVE FILTER
THEORY (1958)
-what was he interested in
-what was the thepry in basic terms

Answer 13

Donald Broadbent (1926-1993)

• Applied/industrial psychologist interested in communication, stress, distraction, and decision and attention
  -interested in the workplace and what people were affected by, help them work more effectively
• Selective Filter Theory: Basic physical properties are
  received by the brain, but a selective filter is needed for
  information processing.
  -interested he started as an applied psychologist
• The theory was based largely on auditory attention and the
  dichotic listening task

Question 14

broadbents selective filter theory 1958

Answer 14

-have sensory input , linking it directly to the dichotic listening
-input in the left ear, attending the left ear, right ear is being supressed
-theres a filter in this model that comes right after the sensory infomation, hits the ear, blocks it, nothing gets past it

-and then from the left ear everything goes ahead into the processing stream, which includes all kind of perceptual analysis , extracting the meaning of the info, identifying objects, committing to memory, responding to them, everything happens after the filter, everything that comes before the filter is like this sensory buffer

input, sunsensory, filter, perceptual, short term memory, response

Question 15

details of the model and questions
-whta is the essential claim

Answer 15

how long does the sensory buffer stage last?
-iconic memory sensory buffer, how long it last has implications for whether our attention can be revisited after its already disappeared

filter
huge debate
Is this the right place for the filter?
What determines the filter capacity?
What is the basis for setting the filter?
-early selectionist, nothing gets passed sensory processing stage
-people challenged it saying maybe you commit something to memory but cant respond etc
can use the analogy of oil filter and keep oil in and gunk out, you wanna in this case have the filter as early as possible
-if the filter was later, maybe would be susceptible to subliminal effects, influence you in a subtle way

short term
How much of this information is stored?
Are probabilities of events stored and used in the filtering process?

Essential Claim: Attention is necessary for identification.

Question 16

attention is necessary for _______

Answer 16

identification

-without attention you have no ability to identify information

Question 17

IS ATTENTION REQUIRED FOR
IDENTIFICATION?

Answer 17

Evidence some unattended information can be identified and/or influence subsequent processing (Moray, 1959; Treisman,
1960).
* Mackay, 1973:

• Shadowed ear: “They threw stones at the bank yesterday”.
• Ignored ear: “ RIVER”
• Or
• Ignored ear: “ LLOYD’S”
  this disambiguated the message

one word ambiguous (bank in this case as it could be a financial bank or a river bank)

• “bias shift”: in later recognition task, asked if they heard “they threw stones at the side of the river” vs. “they threw
  stones at the Lloyd’s”
• People are shifted by 5-9% towards picking the interpretation that fits the unattended ear’s content.
  suggests the information is getting through the filter into the processing engine

Question 18

does the filter ‘leak’ or does it slip

Answer 18

A filter that leaks doesn’t work the way it should.But a filter that slips is “user error”!
-filter isnt being controlled well enough (things ‘leak’ through)

Question 19

what is the status of the filter theory

Answer 19

n psychology, the pace of advance is such that a snapshot of the views of the
present day may seem to have nothing in common with those of a few years ago. This is in truth a sign of strength and of the power of the experimental method ;but it can look like frivolity and lack of sound scholarship to those who have not followed the line of thought that has led from one view to another.

Nonetheless… Lachter, Forster & Ruthruff, 2004: Broadbent’s filter theory was essentially right. All evidence that unattended information is remembered has come from experiments that did not ensure this information was truly
unattended.
This is
important!

Question 20

LAC HTER, FORSTER
& RUTHRUFF, 2004
-what was the task
-how is it measured

Answer 20

• Lexical decision task: you get a string of letters and you have to say is it a word or not a word
  Always attend and report
  the letter strings in the
  bottom row.
  top row is irrelevant, like unattended ear in dichotic listening

measured by:
* Repetition priming: you respond to a target faster when its been primed with the same information

eg top row says agent in cap locks, and then the next one you get shown says agent in the same place , so your going to respond faster to that target

Question 21

LAC HTER, FORSTER
& RUTHRUFF, 2004
summary of task

Answer 21

forward mask = two rows of nothing

then
prime in relavent location = the word in bottom row
or
prime in irrelevant location = word in top row

then
target= the word in cap locks in the bottom row

also have prime display durations of 55ms, 110ms, 165ms

Question 22

results

Answer 22

related / unrelated prime
-faster response when prime is same as target (both words are same)

relevant/irrelevant location
-no affect of prime when appearing in unattended locations (faster response when prime and target in the same location)

(takes 100ms to switch channels)
find that when prime display duration is 55s , you dont have enough time to switch channels, so when the prime is in the irrelevant location, you cant shift your attention to the prime quick enough

-evidence that if attention isn’t controlled enough it can shift/ and influence information that is unattended
-you havent kept the filter tight enough

Question 23

where/ what is this filter

Answer 23

visual processing through the hierarchy
– assembly of edge/color information from V1, increasingly complex and increasingly large Receptive Fields (RFs) as you move through visual areas into temporal cortex.
[feeding eventually into concept-related areas, which are nonspatial.]

the competition for control over these neurons (which can only respond to one thing at a time) becomes more intense the further up the hierarchy you go

each neuron has a receptive field of neurons in the layer before
-filter is happening at every layer of the visual system (its not just one filter)for control over these receptive fields (because neurons can only respond to one thing at a time)

Question 24

how many ms does it take to switch between channels

Answer 24

100

Question 25

what is the biased competition model
-desmone and duncan 1995

Answer 25

-Answer: there is no filter! Attention is “an emergent property of many neural mechanisms working together to resolve competition for… control of behaviour”

Stimuli compete to drive cells at multiple levels/areas.

• Large and/or non-spatial receptive fields at higher levels of representation means only a
  select number of things can be represented at a time => non-selected stimuli are simply not
  represented (things not in the neuron simply dont exist for you)
• Competition can be biased to favour behaviourally relevant perceptual features (more on this later)
  -what the neurons actually select for to pay attention to, is biased according to you, what’s behaviourally relevant, what’s visually salient etc