Attention Importance - Negative outcomes eg. workplace, crashes Applied contexts eg. advertising, user experience Clinical contexts, ADHD, anxiety, schizophrenia, neglect Limitations - Attention is a limited capacity resource Or processing “bottleneck” Processing certain amount at a time Different types of attention Selective attention: - Focusing attention on certain info, while ignoring other info Sustained attention - Maintaining focused attention or vigilance - Eg. security guard monitoring surveillance camera Divided attention - Multi-tasking - Another way of looking at capacity limits Attention to different sensory modalities - Eg. sight, touch, sound, smell - Visual attention has received most examination Studying attention - Visual attention studied through eye movements Example: - Fixate on scoreboard - Without moving eyes can you tell whether there are clouds in sky - Can you tell whether there are more spectators on seats at the back or side Covert versus overt attention Reaction time experiments: Spatial cuing: - Responses typically slower following invalid versus valid cues - Invalid, trying to show you wrong direction - Valid, trying to show you right direction - Suggests spatial attention moved to cued location Works with both endogenous cues and exogenous cues covert spatial attention can be both voluntary and involuntary Visual search - Eg. find green O in sea of red Xs - If target “pops out”, increasing non-targets doesn’t affect RT - If target is a conjunction, RT increases with number of non-targets - Suggests serial search is required Distractor effects - We assume attention has been distracted by a stimulus if it slows us down when it is irrelevant Stroop task (name ink colour of word) - Suggests that we are unable to ignore the word meaning Response competition flanker task: - Responses typically slower when distractors are incongruent compared to congruent or neutral - Suggests even spatially separated distractors cannot be ignored Singleton Attentional Capture Task - We assume attention has been ‘captured’ by a stimulus if it slows us down when it is relevant - Or speeds up our responses when it is the target - Find circle in no distractor condition and distractor condition - Colour singleton non-target increases search RTs - Taken as evidence of “attentional capture” by salient stimuli - Colour singleton target reduces search RTs Error rates: sustained attention to response task - Series of digits one after another - Apart from 3 Self report measures - Often used to test effects of attention on awareness - Eg. change blindness - Also subjective phenomena such as mind wandering - People who report more mind wandering also show more RT interference on measures of distraction and more errors on sustained attention tasks Effects of attention on neural processing - Neural response is boosted for covertly attended stimuli - Two regions known to response selectively to specific stimulus categories: - Fusiform face area (FFA) - Parahippocampal place area (PPA) - Central fixation - Covert attention to faces increased FFA response - Covert attention to houses increased PPA response
