Cognitive Psychology Chapter 4

8/10/2019 Cognitive Psychology Chapter 4

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Chapter 4:

Attention

Multiple Meanings of Attention

!

Attention

one of the most pervasive topics in cognitivepsychology and one of the thorniest

applies to a wide range of phenomena

! Input Attention

"Alertness or arousal

" Orienting reflex or response

" Spotlight attention and research! Controlled Attention

" Selective attention

" Mental resources and conscious processing

" Supervisory attentional system


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Multiple Meanings of Attention

Four interrelated ideas1. We are constantly confronted with more information

than we can attend to.

2. There are serious limitations in how much we can

attend to any at one time.

3. We can respond to some information and performsome tasks with little if any attention.

4. With sufficient practice and knowledge, some tasksbecome less demanding of attention.

Basics of Attention

!

Attention as mental process The mental process of concentrating effort on a stimulus ormental event.

" mental mechanism by which we actively process informationin the sensory registers

" drives the mental event of remembering, searching forinformation stored in memory, and attempting tocomprehend

!

Attention as a limited resource The limited, mental energy or resource that powers cognition.

" a mental commodity, the stuff that gets focused when wepay attention

" can only attend to so many things at once

" can only attend to something for so long


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" First identification of the pattern relies almost exclusively on data-driven processing whereas later identification relies heavily onconceptually-driven processing.

Alertness and Arousal

!

Input Attention: The basic process of getting sensory information into cognition.

! Vigilance / Sustained Attention:

Maintaining attention for infrequent events over a long period oftime (e.g., radar monitor).

Attention can degrade over time, causing a decline inperformance; 20 35 minutes

Improving vigilance in detecting a signal (e.g., plane on radar)"

Make the signal longer

"

Make the signal more frequent

" Make the background less busy


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Alertness and Arousal

! Explicit Processing:

Involving conscious processing, conscious awareness that a taskis being performed, and usually conscious awareness of theoutcome of that performance.

Explicit memory: memory for information and for the momentnew information was encoded (e.g., reading a list of definitions)

! Implicit Processing: Processing in which there is no necessary involvement of

conscious awareness.

Implicit memory:memory for information without awareness,not knowing when new information was encoded and not eventhat it has been encoded.

Orienting Response & Attention Capture!

Orienting Reflex/Orienting Response:

The reflexive redirection of attention that orients you toward theunexpected stimulus.

Including physical redirection: body movement & eye gaze

! Attention capture:

The spontaneous redirection of attention.

Mental aspect of redirection

Attention can be captured by changes in movement, abruptonsets, visual color, auditory pitch, etc.

! Attention is typically directed toward significant, novel, or different

stimuli, but can also be directed by

Emotion

Social cues

Context


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Orienting Response & Attention Capture

! Habituation:

A gradual reduction of the orienting response.

Allows attention to deal with constant, unchanging aspects ofthe world.

!

Spotlight attention: The mental attention-focusing mechanisms that prepares you to

encode stimulus information.

Posners study concluded that shifting attentional focus is athoroughly cognitive phenomenon, not tied to eye movements orother overt behavior.

Process is rapid, automatic, and perceptual

Triesmans Visual search task: Search for a boldface T in each box.


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!

Search times when targets were of a specific color orshape!

Conjunction condition: search for a blodfaced, capital T

!

Disjunction condition: search for either a boldfaced letter or a capital T

Triesmans Visual Search Task

!

There was no increase in RT across the display sizes(larger display meant more distractors) in the disjunctionsearch condition

Therefore, visual search for a dimension such as shape or coloroccurs in parallelacross the entire region of visual attention.

! Search is largely automatic and represents very earlyvisual processing (before conscious awareness).

!

Conjunction conditions showed evidence of a slower,deliberate attentional process, called controlledattention.


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A Disorder of Attention: Hemineglect!

Hemineglect: A disruption or decreased ability to attend to something.

" Typically found in the left visual field.

an attention disorder in which one half of the perceptual world isneglected to some degree and is not attended to as completelyor as accurately as normal.

arises from an inability to disengage

attention, hence disrupting the process

of shifting attention to the opposite side

Controlled, Voluntary Attention

!

Controlled Attention: Forms of processing with a deliberate, voluntary allocation of

mental effort or concentration.

! Selective Attention:

The ability to attend to one source of information while ignoringor excluding others.

! Filtering or selecting:

Ignoring the many stimuli or events around so that only oneevent can be focused on.

Ignored stimuli are distractions that must be eliminated orexcluded.

The mental process of eliminating those distractions is calledfilteringor selecting.


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A brief note about Dual Task

! Dual Task or Dual Message Procedure:

Two tasks or messages are presented such that onetask or message captures attention as much aspossible.

Purposefully overloading the sensory system to

handle more than it can process

A widely used Cognitive psychology research methodthat lets us know how much attention a taskdemands.

Treismans Attenuation Theory!

A series of studies exploring slippage

unattended information slipping past the filtering mechanism.

! All incoming messages receive some low-level analysis,including the analysis of the physical characteristics rejected the early selectionidea embodied in Broadbents

theory.

! When unattended messages yield no useful or important

information, they are attenuated; they are reduced in theirinformational importance to ongoing processing.


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Selective Attention

! Mind Wandering

Sometimes our selective attention wanders off track.

Mind wandering occurs when attention drifts off-taskto some other inappropriate line of thought.

"

e.g., getting to the bottom of the page and not knowingwhat you just read

Can occur without awareness that a switch inattention has happened

More likely to occur when:

"A person is not fully engaged in a task.

" There is mental capacity left over.

" The person has other pressing personal concerns or anxieties

Selective Attention!

Inhibition. Actively suppress irrelevant information so that its activationlevel is below baseline, remains below attentional awareness

This information then does not intrude on the current stream ofthought.

! Negative Priming

Slower responding to a target when that target was a to-be-ignored item on the previous trial.

Reflects the operation of an active inhibition mechanism ofattention.


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Attention as a Mental Resource

! Psychological Refractory Period or Attentional Blink:

A brief slow-down in mental processing due to having processedanother very recent event

Allocating attention to a stimulus decreases the amount ofattention available for a second stimulus

! Automaticity:

Perceptual or cognitive processes that can occur withoutconscious awareness or intention

Consume little if any of the available mental resources.

Criteria for automatic processing"

The process occurs without intention, without a conscious decision"

The mental process is not open to conscious awareness or introspection"

The process consumes few if any conscious resources"

The process operates very rapidly, usually with 1 s. (informal criterion)

Automatic and Conscious Processing Theories

!

Priming: Mental activation of a concept by some means, or the spread of

that activation from one concept to another.

" Reading the word eagle makes other related concepts(wing, talon, beak, flying) more accessible in memory andtherefore more quickly attended to if presented (e.g., lexicaldecision task)

The activation of target information by action of a previouslypresented prime.


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A Synthesis for Attention and Automaticity

! Attention is equivalent to mental capacity.

We can devote resources to only one demanding taskat a time or two less demanding tasks simultaneously,as long as together they do not exceed the totalcapacity available.

The more automatic a task, the more resourcesavailable for other tasks.

! The route to automaticity is practice & memory.

With repetition and overlearning comes the ability toperform automatically what formerly neededconscious processing.

Disadvantages of Automaticity

!

Automaticity is difficult to reverse The effects of practice create an autonomous process that can

lead to errors of inattention.

! Action Slips:

Unintended, often automatic, actions that are inappropriate forthe current situation."

e.g., getting off on the exit to get to work when you actually intended to gosomewhere else.

Distractions can cause someone to lapse into a more automaticprocess.

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Cognitive Psychology Chapter 4