Week 6 Flashcards
Why do we need attention?
• Limitations on what can be processed at
any one time
• We do suffer the effects of attentional
limitations
• Even hands-free mobile phone use by drivers is
associated with an increase in car accidents
• Even if we have enough limbs to perform
actions for two concurrent tasks
• We can usually make only one decision about
action at a time
• We cannot decide on what response to make
for one task without causing a delay in this
response selection for the other task
Capturing attention
• Certain events may attract or “capture” our attention
• Sudden lightning strike, dog running on road, attacker dropping from tree in
movie.
• What makes a stimulus capture attention?
• sudden onset, intense, unexpected in the situation
• what we are looking for (target) and what we are trying to do
• Evidence that stimuli sharing features with targets are more likely to
capture attention
• e.g., red objects if we are looking for a red unmbrella
• Debate about the relative importance of stimulus features
(bottom-up) and expectations (top-down).
Selective attention
Investigating attention in the lab often involves asking
participants (Ps) to respond to a relevant stimulus and ignore
a currently present irrelevant stimulus
• “selective” attention
• usually made difficult by making the irrelevant stimulus on the
current trial serve as the relevant stimulus on other trials
• so participants must select a stimulus from two strongly
competing alternatives
• e.g., Stroop test - name the letter colour and ignore the colour word
RED YELLOW GREEN
Divided attention
• Participants must divide their attention over two or more
concurrent tasks
• as in cooking the dinner while watching TV or doing homework
• Researchers manipulate
• the priority of tasks; e.g., one task is “primary”
• the temporal overlap (overlap in time) of various
components of the tasks
• Ps show attentional limitations that we hope will
inform us about human cognitive processes
So what IS attention?
• a determination of the soul to know something in
preference to other things (Leibniz, 17th
century)
• “Everyone knows what attention is. It is
taking possession by the mind, in clear and
vivid form, of one out of what seem several
simultaneously possible objects or trains of
thought… It implies withdrawal from some
things in order to deal effectively with others.
(William James, 1890)
• The concentration and focusing of mental effort (Best,
contemporary text)
• In the language of cognitive psychology:
• Selecting what is relevant from sensory input and
processing it for appropriate action
• Attention refers to the prioritising of cognitive
operations
Directing attention: Sustaining vs. shifting
We need to maintain or sustain attention in many tasks • e.g., listening to a lecture, following the plot of a film, doing mental arithmetic • But we must be flexible enough to shift attention when required • looking after several children playing on equipment at the park • Neuropsychological evidence for different neural systems for distinct attentional functions - maintaining, disengaging, and directing visual attention - PSYC2020
Shifts of attention:
More about attentional capture
• Shifting attention can be voluntary and directed by
current goals
• endogenous control
• Tuning out of a dull conversation at a party and
tuning into another
• Can be an automatic response to an important stimulus
• exogenous control
• When your attention is captured by hearing your
best friend’s name in a conversation
Inattentional blindness
• When people focus their attention, they often
miss other elements of a scene in plain sight
Change blindness
• Changes in a scene are missed because they occur
alongside a brief visual disruption (Image Flicker,
Eye Movements (saccades), Eye Blink, Occlusions
by Passing Objects, Real world Int-erruptions
So what do change & inattentional blindness
tell us?
Attention is more than where the eyes are
directed
• We perceive only a small fraction of the
external world
• “What we see is what is what we
(attentionally) set”
Objects and locations
• Neurophysiological evidence suggests (somewhat)
separate systems for processing “what” vs. “where” and
“when”
• Attention can operate at the level of objects, not just
regions of space
• In the basketball game, locations in a scene are
searched for objects
• Some objects (gorillas) in the field of view are not
attended
• Stimuli on same object, that is attended, receive
preferential processing
Bálint’s
syndrome:
Simultanagnosia
bilateral occipital/parietal lobe damage prevents patients from perceiving more than 1 stimulus at a time. Grouping stimuli helps this.
Metaphors for attentional limitations
• Structure – bottlenecks, gates, stores (often
shown using boxes & arrows)
• Process – capacity, resources, types of task
demand, spotlight
• The strategic view (Neumann, Allport):
• Limitations are the byproducts of the need to co-ordinate
action and ensure that the correct stimulus information is
controlling the intended responses
• Neumann: (avoid) the behavioural chaos that would result
from an attempt to simultaneously perform all possible
actions for which sufficient causes exist
Historical overview of research
• Helmholtz (1867/1925) performed the first covert attention experiment. • The screen full of letters was larger than his field of view, so he had to select an area to attend to. • Even without moving his eyes, he could still attend to particular locations. Covert vs Overt attention • Unattended locations were just a blur.
Early attention research
• How much info accesses memory for identification & access of meaning? • Attention & memory encoding: How much can you tell us about information that is not attended? • e.g., the people sitting near you when you are watching an engrossing film? • The cocktail party effect • How do we keep track of one conversation; tune out others • But respond when we hear our name in another conversation?
