Attention Attention navigates you through your surroundings Without the ability to carry out processing resources you wont be able to learn new things Operational definitions are necessary for testing cognitive models o Phenomenon model hypothesis Defining attention is a challenging task William James wrote about the topic of attention Selection allows us to focus on what matters o Selection: attending to something causes the object of attention to be selected apart from the rest of the unattended object Stimuli can stimulate your attention in an automatic fashion – stop light Attention is an active process You are actively selecting where to focus your attention When irrelevant information overwhelms us, we get distracted We are adapt at distinguishing irrelevant from the relevant information Sometimes the noise overrides the signal and you get distracted Automatic and controlled attention Underlying mechanism Automatic processes: involuntary process that captures your attention o Fast, efficient o Cause your attention to quickly dart to the given situation Controlled process: guide voluntarily and consciously to objects of interest o Slow more cognitive effort o Driving requires controlled processes Our attentional resources are limited and must be controlled We can only focus on so many tasks at a time Salient information captures our attention automatically some cues are more noticeable when paired with events Salient information: appears to naturally pop out at you o Ex. Hard to miss the sound of nearby driver honking their horn whether you attended to or not Consciously effortful tasks can become automatic through practice The spotlight model Visual attention: focuses like a spotlight Physical spotlight illuminates’ part of the stage at a time Intentional spotlight focuses on part of the environment at a time Objects within your spotlight: faster reaction time. Higher accuracy How to psychologists examine this attention? Cuing paradigms: test the automatic process of attention, determine whether the manipulating attention can influence behaviour Our attentional spotlight is automatically attracted to cues o Flashing box automatically targeted the attentional spotlight to the cued location o Un-cued un attended location will have a slower attention Attention can shift faster than the eye Filter models Bottleneck: Only a limited amount of attentional information can be passed on for further processing. Auditory attention We use auditory cues to filter target sounds from background noise Shadowing task – focus on one message when played at the same time with another Physical characteristics depend on our ability to filter target sounds Spotlights enhance the stimulus, whereas filters suppress the noise Information Filter Further processing Filter: only allows important information through The single filter model is based on the physical characteristic of stimuli o Donald Broadbent: interested in practical problems The only information that is attended is filtered through for deeper processing Subjects remember nothing about unattended information Limitation: assumes there is no additional processing of unattended information Subjects show a response to unattended information o Participants remember nothing about unattended information Single filter mode of Broadbents: Assumes any filtered information cannot be processed further and doesn’t explain the breakthrough effect Early-selection theory: Our attentional filter is located early in the process. Information is filtered out early before any semantic processing has occurred. This theory was proposed by Broadbent. Cocktail party effect. Despite competing background noises, a listener can focus on a single channel of information (e.g., having a conversation amidst many other people talking in the background). Dual filter model of Triesmans: processing of irrelevant information Breakthrough: participants remember unattended information o Important information. Common when unattended information is highly relevant Physical (early) filter: information is evaluated based on physical cues such as intensity or pitch to find the most relevant signal. Importance of incoming stimuli based on these physical cues and passes through the semantic filter Semantic (late) filter: evaluated through meaning. Takes into account weights of physical filter and chooses the deepest meaning and relevance of stimuli and which information to attend to. o Determines what ultimately gets selected for attention o Override early filter decisions by determining the meaning The Stroop Task Manipulates the congruency of the text colour and text meaning Produces an effect almost impossible to avoid o Congruent: red displayed in red font (faster reaction) o Incongruent: blue displayed in green font (slower reaction) Demonstrates that attention is facilitated by stimulus relevance Congruent trials facilitates colour meaning Incongruent trials interferes with colour meaning performance Controlling the Stroop effect Proportion congruent manipulation: change the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials o 75% congruent o 25% incongruent Increased stroop effect: more congruent percentage Decreased stroop effect: more incongruent percentage The Stroop task shows that automatic process can be consciously controlled Automatic: evidence - word reading influences performance even when the word is to be ignored Controlled: people can adopt consciously controlled word reading strategies that modulate the Stroop effect o The Stroop Effecct demonstrates that attention is facilitated by stimulus relevance Visual search Visual search tasks can be influenced by the set size Single features search tasks are relatively easy Colour features stand out Designed to test how we used every day attention More difficult: increase number of items we have to search through Set size: the number of items to search through Set size effect: increase in difficulty as set size increases Pop-out effect: when the object of a visual search is easily found, regardless of set size o Easily induced by colour o Captures our automatic attention o Never found in conjunction searches. Conjunction searches use two or more features to create a more difficult search o Attention is the glue required for conjunctive research Context cues our attention and improves our reaction time o Context cueing can improve your life Cocktail party effect: Despite competing background noises, a listener can focus on a single channel of information (e.g., having a conversation amidst many other people talking in the background). Lecture Vigilance: selected focus when being alert Bottom up processing: gathering information by our sensory systems o Our biases effect our perceptions Top down processing: Using a combination of our memories, biases, and heuristics to interpret information. o associated with cases where you must direct your attention to match your current goals ex. Putting keys in the same spot every time. Research Focused attention: multiple stimuli and person is told to just focus on one o Opens up questions about what happens to the message of the unattended stimuli Divided attention: participants attend to all stimuli. o Multitasking id divided attention Inattentional blindness: Our limited attentional resources can result in missing out (not noticing) some very important or salient things. Change blindness paradigm: A perceptual phenomenon where a change has occurred in a visual scene, but the observer does not notice or cannot identify it.
