Selective attention in cognitive and clinical research
Jenny Yiend1, Andrew Mathews1 and Nelson Cowan2
1
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK.
2
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA.
Address correspondence to: Jenny Yiend
MRC-Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge, CB2 2EF, U.K.
Fax: 01223 359062
Email: jenny.yiend@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
Look around and you can’t help but become aware that the external world contains far
more information than can be taken in at any one instant. The concept of selective
attention is the psychologist’s attempt to explain how our limited capacity processing
system deals with this overload of information. As psychologists we assume that
selective attention starts with competition between possible inputs (both internal and
external) resulting in a selection of what is important together with a rejection of the
remainder. The precise point at which this selection occurs is one topic that we
discuss in the first of our companion chapters.
The use of the phrase selective attention can however create the misleading
impression that because there is one word there is also one process. On the contrary,
when one source of information is to be selected at the expense of another, there are
various processes that could be used to achieve this. For example one might maintain
visual focus on a particular location; search through items looking for one and
ignoring others; or elect to perform one entire task rather than another, more habitual,
one. All require selection but may recruit different cognitive and neural processes.
Together with most psychologists, we view performance in such situations as being a
variable composite of bottom-up and top-down processes. Thus the capture of
perceptual resources by a sensory event, such as the appearance of an object, may be
influenced by higher control systems which can to some extent determine the outcome
of competition arising from multiple inputs (e.g. Desimone & Duncan, 1995).
An interesting point raised towards the end of our first chapter is that this
capacity to effortfully screen out unwanted information varies across people.
Individuals with high working memory capacity may be better able to inhibit
unwanted information from capturing attention. Clearly this is also relevant to clinical
research, where resources are often depleted, for example due to preoccupations with
worrisome thoughts. Some of the findings of attention to emotional distracters may
therefore represent inhibition failure due to reduced resources and impaired
attentional control (Derryberry & Reed, 2002; Eysenck & Calvo, 1992) as well as the
specific content of emotional distractors.
The impetus to develop methods of assessing attention in clinical populations
grew out of the intuition that people with particular emotional disorders deploy their
attention in distinctive ways, and that this may be a factor in maintaining that
disorder. Some clinical researchers (e.g. Beck, 1976) have long argued that emotional
disorders are caused by maladaptive cognitive processes or schemata that influence
how emotional information is encoded. Data showing that anxious patients, relative
to control groups, attended more to threatening cues (e.g. Williams, Watts, MacLeod,
& Mathews, 1997) has been taken as support for this general view. Additional data
suggesting that cues related to individual worries or concerns were particularly likely
to capture attention was taken as further evidence that measures of attentional
deployment may be useful for diagnostic purposes, or as a means of investigating
etiological differences.
In our first chapter we explore the range of methods most commonly used
within cognitive psychology to assess selective attention. For clarity these are
categorized into cueing, search, filtering, and multiple task paradigms. Cueing tasks
describe methods in which a stimulus or event attracts attention to a particular
location(s) and is followed by a target to be detected, with attention usually measured
by the speed of participants’ response. This method also happens to be one that has
been widely adopted by clinical researchers. Discussion of it thus forms a large part of
our second chapter, which focuses on the application of selective attention tasks to
clinical populations.
In search tasks, participants must find and report on a particular target in an array of
distractors. A specific example of such a task is the "face-in-the-crowd" method,
again discussed at length in our clinical chapter, in which angry faces are easier to
find than those with neutral expressions.
Filtering tasks involve presenting targets and distractors together, testing participants’
ability to suppress or ignore the latter. The Stroop task is perhaps the most obvious
example of this (the emotional Stroop when applied to clinical populations) but this is
not discussed here as it is the topic of another chapter.
Finally, in multiple tasks, people must allocate their limited processing
capacity to meet more than one demand, as when having to report two sequential
targets, in the ‘attentional blink’ method. Attending to one target takes time, meaning
that another arriving too soon afterwards is often missed. We touch on this method
only briefly in the clinical chapter as work on its application to emotional processing
is only just beginning.
In Table 1 we attempt to summarize the methods discussed in our two chapters
into a single framework. It is hoped that this will provide the reader with both an
overview of the chapters themselves and a guide for easy future reference.
[INSERT TABLE ONE ABOUT HERE]
We will end this introduction by emphasizing the point made in both chapters,
that specific variations of method can often have powerful effects on results. These
can only be understood from a sound knowledge of the many factors, theoretical and
methodological, influencing attention and its interaction with emotion. We hope that
together our chapters will assist the researcher in developing this understanding and
will focus future work into domains of optimum theoretical and clinical relevance.
Table 1. Framework describing selective attentional studies
Category
Method
Single
Cueing
Location
cueing
Deployment
of attention
task (DOAT)
Double
Cueing
Attentional
(dot) probe
Target among
Distractors
e.g. Face-inthe-crowd
Search
Eye
movement
monitoring
Stroop
Putative
mechanisms
Spatial shifting,
engaging and
disengaging
Pre-emptive
Recruitment of
Attention by
Significant
Stimulus
Spatial
engagement,
shifting,
disengagement
Key cognitive
studies
Serial/ parallel
search; spatial
engagement;
distractor
suppression
Attention –
Switching,
Engagement,
and
Disengagement
Spatial and non
spatial
interference;
distractor
suppression
Shiffrin &
Schneider
(1977);
Treisman &
Gelade (1980)
Rayner (1998)
Filtering
Dichotic
Stimuli with
Selective
Listening
Distractor
suppression;
auditory
attention
Flanker task
Distractor
suppression
Posner (1980)
Stroop (1935);
Elliott, Cowan,
& Valle-Inclan
(1998);
MacLeod
(1991)
Cherry (1953);
Moray (1959);
Conway,
Cowan, and
Bunting (2001)
Eriksen and
Eriksen (1974)
Key clinical
studies
Fox et al. (2001);
Yiend and
Mathews (2001)
Gotlib,
McLachlan and
Katz (1988);
McCabe and
Toman (2000)
MacLeod,
Mathews and
Tata (1986);
Mogg and
Bradley (1999)
Byrne and
Eysenck (1995);
Fox et al. (2000)
Populations
studied
Analogue non
clinical only
Matthews and
Antes (1992);
Mogg, Millar
and Bradley
(2000)
Mathews and
MacLeod
(1985);
Williams,
Mathews and
MacLeod (1996)
Mathews and
MacLeod (1986)
Analogue non
clinical;
GAD, spider
phobics
Mathews, May,
Mogg and
Eysenck (1990)
Analogue non
clinical; GAD
Analogue non
clinical;
depressed,
GAD
Analogue non
clinical; most
clinical
Unselected;
analogue non
clinical;
social anxiety
Analogue non
clinical; most
clinical
GAD; PTSD
Attentional
blink
Pre-emptive
Recruitment of
Attention by
Significant
Stimulus
Raymond,
Shapiro, &
Arnell, 1992;
Reeves &
Sperling, 1986
Dichotic
Stimuli with
Dual
Monitoring
Inattentional
Blindness
Need for
Attentionswitching
Broadbent
(1957)
Limit in
Capacity of
Attentional
Focus
Limit in
Capacity of
Visual
Attention
Cowan (2001);
Rensink (2002)
Simons (2000)
Multiple
tasks
Multi-object
Tracking
Pylyshyn and
Storm (1988)
Barnard and
Ramponi
(personal
communication);
Mackintosh,
Munafo and
Barnard
(personal
communication)
Analogue non
clinical
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