Lecture 7 - Attention & Distraction Flashcards
What is attention?
“[Attention] is the taking possession by
the mind, in clear and vivid form, of
one out of what seem several
simultaneously possible objects or
trains of thought”
Selective attention
The process of directing our awareness to relevant stimuli while ignoring irrelevant stimuli in the environment
Top-down processing
Goal-driven (endogenous cues)
Bottom-up processing
Stimulus driven (exogenous cues)
Attributes that guide attention
Colour
Motion
Orientation
Size
Real-world examples attention guidance
- Pop-up adds
- Notifications
Fundamental rules of visual salience
Salience of a target increases with:
- Target-distractor heterogeneity
- Distractor-distractor Homogeneity
Target-distractor heterogeneity
Search performance is best when there is a boundary in feature space that seperates the distractor features from the target feature
Distractor-distractor homogeneity
Increasing the homogeneity of distractors increases search efficiency, because homogeneous elements are being grouped more easily, and grouping reduces the number of perceptual units that have to be searched subsequently
Salience maps
Attention is influenced by the salience of the stimuli in the visual field
Lightest place is the place most looked at
Results - Van Gogh Experiment
Children used bottom-up (exogeneous cues)
Adults used top-down (endogeneous cue)
What items attraction most attention
- Items relevant to survival
- Faces
- Babies
Centre bias
We have a tendency to look at the centre of paintings
Photographer bias
A natural tendency of photographers to place objects or actors of interest near the centrer of their composition.
Viewing strategy
Viewers may reorient at a greater frequency to the center of a scene relative to other locations, if they expect highly salient or interesting objects to be placed there.
Solutions to biases
Use a baseline
Divided attention
Multitasking
Our brain’s ability to attend to two
different stimuli at the same time
Negatively affects memory and
learning
Tasks compete for limited attentional
resources
Central capacity theory
Input –> sensorial organs –> attentional resources –> possible responses (or prerequisite assessment, terug naar attentional resources) –> response selection
Multiple resources theory
Input –> sensorial organs –> attentional resources –> possible responses –> response selection
What types of attentional resources are there?
- Visual modality
- Auditory modality
- Other modality
Critiques to capacity theories
- Too simple
- Resources are not observable
Predictions of capacity theories
- we can attend to more than one thing as long as our resources are not exceeded.
- Performance will decline if the resource pool is depleted.
- The system is flexible: we can shift our attention based on what our current needs are.
Results - experiment Spelke et al.
Reading speed while performing
the dual task increases
throughout the weeks.
What affects divided attention
- Attentional tasks interfere with each other if they involve similar activities.
- Tasks that share one sensory modality are particularly difficult (e.g.,
listening to two people at the same time). - Other factors affecting divided attention: anxiety, arousal, task
difficulty, skills.
Applications of divided attention
- Drivin and cell phone use
- Disracted walking
- Distracted learning
Driving and cell phone use
Using a cell phone while driving
diminishes performance
- This is true even if you are using a
hand free device
- Driver distraction is estimated to be
one of the leading causes of motor
vehicle accidents
Distracted walking
- Slower motor performance and reaction time when you engage in
a secondary task while walking - People looking at their phone fail to notice a clown riding on a
unicycle (Hyman et al., 2010)
Inattentional blindness
The failure to notice a fully-visible, but unexpected object because
attention was engaged on another task, event, or object
Distracted learning
Rapidly switching between tasks
comes with a switching cost
Negative effects:
- Mental fatigue
- Negative performance
- Learning tasks take longer to
complete
Improve learning
- Increase cognitive control abilities
- Learn to better manage the distractions around and within you
- Strengthen your goals
- Physical exercise
- Meditation
How to manage distractions
- Increase metacognition
- Decrease accessibility
- Decrease boredom
Strengthen your goals
- Set clear (and achievable) goals
- Implementation intention: a plan we make beforehand about
WHAT we are going to do and WHEN we are going to do it
Sustained attention
Often referred to as vigilance or alertness
“Vigilance refers to the ability of organisms to maintain their
focus of attention and to remain alert to stimuli over prolonged
periods of time”
Applications SA
- Air traffic control
- Military radar operations
- Airport screening
- Automated driving
Main factors affecting attention and vigilance
- Time on task
- Rest to activity ratio
- Sleep loss
- Motivation
Time on task
Limited ability to maintain vigilance over extended periods of time.
This can be easily seen through the Clock Vigilance Task (Mackworth,
1950).
The vigilence decrement
Accuracy of detection declines about 10% after the first half-hour
- The decrement occurs often within 15 minutes
- With high task demands even within 5 minutes
- Both with experienced and naïve observers
- Not just an artificial lab phenomenon
Results Greenly et al. - Vigilence decrement
The percentage of correct detections decreased through time
Reaction time: Mean reaction time increased through time
Rest to activity ratio
How much rest people get when performing a task can strongly impact
vigilance
Sleep loss
- Sleep loss induces lapses (Dinges et al.,
1997) - The negative effects of sleep loss
can often be seen very shortly after
a task has been started (Gillberg &
Akerstedt, 1998) - 1 out of 5 car crashes are caused by
drivers falling asleep (The Washington Post,
2014)
Noise and sleep loss
Noise can have different effects on participants’ vigilance depending
on how sleep deprived they are
