Mechanisms of selective and divided attention Flashcards
What is attention? - Sternberg 1999
Attention acts as a means of focusing limited mental resources on the information and cognitive processes that are most salient at a given moment
Describe attention as a mental process
Concentrating effort into a stimulus or a mental event (thought)
- Forcing yourself to pay attention in this lecture is an example
- The means by which we actively process information in the sensory registers (sensation caused by light hitting the eyes, in the case of perception)
Describe attention as a limited mental source
Attention as a kind of fuel/mental energy that powers cognition
•It gets used up when we “pay” attention
•Attention is limited
What is attention for?- Selection
We are constantly presented with information from the external world
- Audition: Numerous overlapping sounds simultaneously reach your ears. The busy street; the conversation in the noisy pub
- Vision: complexity and information overload characterize most visual environments
- Your own thoughts: Even what you are thinking competes for your attention…Our attentional capacity is severely limited:
There is only so much we can attend to at one time
Effective selection of information is critical to functioning
Division
Most things you do during the day involve a degree of ‘multi-tasking’
•Writing notes while listening
•Walking and having a conversation
•Watching TV while on the phone
•Listening to music while studying
•Various factors impact on our ability to divide attention Effectively dividing your attention is also critical, as is knowing the limitations
What is selective attention?
how’s it studied?
what does it demonstrate?
focusing all of our attention on one task
present 2 or more stimuli and instruct to attend to one of them
our ability to select, and the fate of unattended stimuli
what is divided attention?
hows it studied?
what does it demonstrate?
sharing your attention between tasks
present ppts with multiple stimuli and instruct to attend to all
the processing limitations of attention
divided attention: task similarity
Specificity of Resources: Allport, Antonis & Reynolds (1972)
Presented participants with a list of words through headphones into one ear.
Task: Shadow these words
Simultaneously: Presented them with a second list.
Later on, memory tested for items for second list
The specificity of Resources: Allport, Antonis & Reynolds (1972) - conditions
The second list presented to the other (unattended) ear.
The second list presented visually on a computer screen.
The second list consisted of images presented visually on screen
Requirements similar, but task similarity varied
Hear words + hear words = high similarity
Hear words + see words = less similarity
Hear words + see images = low similarity
Modality specific resources: Most interference should come from condition 1, and least from condition 3
.General pool of resources: performance should be similar in all three
Found: Most interference in condition 1; followed by 2, followed by 3
Divide attention : practice
Spelke, Hirst & Neisser (1976
Difficult tasks can become less attentionally demanding through practice
Spelke et al. (1976) trained their participants (e.g., gave them practice) on two tasks that are hard to combine.
Two students were trained for 5 hours per week over a 4 month period
Task: read a story for comprehension while also writing dictation.
This was initially really hard, but after 6 weeks they could perform the task very well
divided Attention, Practice & Automatic Processing
If you do a task enough times, it feels less demanding. There’s a psychological reason for that.
- Practice decreases resource demands by diminishing the need for moment-by-moment task control
- Controlled tasks draw more attention than uncontrolled tasks
.•With practice a person approaches a task with a well learned sequence of responses that they have done in the past
•A ‘routine’ like this becomes automated and no longer needs to be supervised or controlled and therefore requires fewer resources
What Makes a Process Automatic? Posner & Snyder (1974; 1975)
A process is automatic if it meets the following criteria:
- It occurs unintentionally
- It occurs unconsciously(outside of awareness)
- It operates without depleting the resources of attention
What Makes a Process Automatic? - Logan 1988
a task becomes automatic when practice changes it so much that it relies on knowledge stored in long-term memory
attention & Automatic Processing
- the effects of automacity
Automatic processes are uncontrolled, take little cognitive effort (attention) and therefore difficult to inhibit.
Not always beneficial!