Attention
PERTEMUAN 3
3.1 Attention
• Auditory attention
• Cherry (1953),cocktail party phenomenon
– that is, the ability of normal people to attend to
a single conversation against a background of
numerous conversations taking place in
parallel
3.2 The role of attention in
perception
Attentional glue
• On one level, stimuli are presented to the visual
system as sets of features, on another level they
are perceived as coherent objects in the world.
• Treisman and Schmidt (1982), the role of
attention is to act as perceptual glue which
binds the sets of features that we process
together into coherent percepts of objects.
• Feature Integration Theory, or FIT.
– features are assembled in appropriate
relationships to form percepts of objects as
we attend to those objects.
– feature integration depends upon use of
spatial relationships, depth cues and principal
axes.
3.3 Automaticity
Shiffrin and Schneider's theory
• automatic processing as processing which
is not capacity limited; that is, not
• affected by the limitations of short-term or
working memory, and not dependent upon
attention.
3.4 The spotlight model of visual
attention
• Posner (1978), two stage model of attention:
– First stage, automatic process, fast, and involuntary
• presentation of a stimulus initially makes contact with its
internal representation
– The second stage, conscious and slower.
• result in the generation of expectancies based on the
information contained in priming stimuli.
• Visual orienting
– defined as the shifting of visual attention to various
spatial locations.
3.5 Prosopagnosia
• Prosopagnosia is an inability to recognise
faces that cannot be explained by sensory
impairment.
• Severely prosopagnosic individuals are
often unable to recognise members of
their immediate family (husbands/wives,
children, etc.) and sometimes do not
recognise their own reflection.
The case of the unknown sheep: a
case study in prosopagnosia
• McNeil and Warrington (1993)
– the case of WJ,51 yo male, suffered from
strokes
Deficits in the perception of specific
facial expressions
• Ekman and colleagues identified a set of
universal facial expressions (happiness,
surprise, fear, sadness, disgust and anger)which
they argued were recognised in all cultures
(Ekman, 1982).
– identification of a facial expression is a categorical
process, with any expression always being
recognised as one of these six.
– This gives rise to the possibility that
– a deficit in expression analysis might be specific to
one particular expression.