attention

Question 1

different conceptions - attention and consciousness

Answer 1

• Consciousness was central to James, but is attention the same thing as consciousness?
  
  • Strong case now being made that they aren’t the same thing e.g., Koch and Tsuchiya, 2007.
  • Is attention necessary to consciousness?
  • Is consciousness necessary for attention?
• What’s Freud got to do with anything?

Question 2

attention and consciousness

Answer 2

• Example of unconscious influence - Kouider et al, 2006, gaze contingent crowing paradigm.
  
  • Evidence for attention without consciousness:
    1. Method called Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS).
    
    2. Unconscious attentional modulation e.g., Jiang et al (2006).

Question 3

attention is many things

Answer 3

• In the absence of a fully encompassing definition of a concept we adopt ‘working definitions’ to proceed.
  
  • Attention as a process:
    1. Selective attention - close to James’ use - the ability to preferentially process a subset of all available information.
    2. Sustained attention - the ability to maintain a state of high alertness/arousal/vigilance.
  • Attention as a resource:
    3. A set of limited resources for cognitive processing.
• Divided attention - our ability to distribute attention over a range of competing inputs.

Question 4

selective auditory attention

Answer 4

• Shadowing/Dichotic listening - laboratory analogue of the “cocktail party phenomenon”.
  
  • Early experiments showed that participants could tell the experimenters very little about the information presented to the non-shadowed ear (Cherry, 1953).
  • Shadowing/Dichotic listening:
  • Participants were unable to:
    1. Remember the contents of the message.
    2. Recognise the language of the message.
    3. Tell if the speech was reversed.
    4. Tell if the language changed.
  • But could:
    5. Tell if the message was a voice or noise.
    6. Tell if a voice changed from male to female.
    7. Detect a sudden tone.
• The fact that people often couldn’t tell what language was being spoken in the non-shadowed ear led to development of early selection filter models (e.g., Broadbent, 1958).

Question 5

broadbent’s filter theory

Answer 5

• The filter selects information on the basis of its gross physical properties (pitch, loudness, etc)

Question 6

evidence that information beyond the “physical” is processed

Answer 6

• Participants show SCRs to shock associated words despite not report hearing the word (Von Wright et al, 1975).
  
  • Participants shadow meaning if channels are switched.
  • This prompted debate over whether selection occurred early vs late in the information processing stream.
• End result - Triesman’s attenuation model (with an essentially flexible filter) provides a good explanation for most of the data.

Question 7

selective visual attention

Answer 7

• We also selectively process only a subset of visual input.
  
  • Only a very small area of our retina is capable of processing visual information with a high degree of acuity.
  • Compensated for by moving our eyes 2-3 times a second.
  • Eye movements and attention are intimately linked.
• The phenomenon of change blindness (aka attentional blindness) reveals just how little information we take in from a scene.

Question 8

selective visual attention 2

Answer 8

• Cognitive psychologists have explored the nature of visual attention using visual search tasks.
  
  • Parallel vs serial search:
    1. Parallel searches have flat set size functions.
    
    2. Serial searches have positive set size functions.

Question 9

what we learn from visual search experiments

Answer 9

• Basic feature analyses (colour/ orientation/ intensity) occurs in parallel - so targets defined by a single feature “popout” instantly.
  
  • Feature integration occurs next, and attention is the “visual glue” that allows different features to be combined to form a coherent percept.
  • Conjoint searches have positive set-size functions because each stimulus must be processed one at a time in order to bind the features together.
• Feature integration theory (Triesman, 1988).

Question 10

attention as a spotlight or zoom lens

Answer 10

• What is the focus of attention?
  
  • Objects (see Triesman) or locations in space (see Posner).
  • Posner (1980) developed a cueing paradigm and demonstrated attentional enhancements without eye movements.
  • Participants simply press a button as soon as the see a target in one of the two flanking boxes.
  • Valid cues facilitated RTs (faster that where no cue).
• Invalid cues inhibited RTs (slower than where no cue).

Question 11

selective visual attention 3

Answer 11

• These experiments demonstrate “covert orienting” of attention - without eye movements.
  
  • The endogenous cue makes participants shift their spotlight to the right - so quicker to respond on valid trials, but slower on invalid trials (attention has to be shifted back).
• Some evidence supporting the spotlight metaphor, but Joula et al, (1991) show it isn’t simple.

Question 12

attention and automaticity

Answer 12

• What happens when attention is not required?
  
  • Automaticity often results from extensive practice:
    1. E.g., reading - the Stroop effect.
    2. E.g., driving a familiar route - how do I get here?
  • Automatic behaviours are a rich source of action slips:
    3. E.g., taking a usual route home instead of going via the shops - automatically driven by usual cues.
    4. E.g., putting the empty yogurt pot in the washing up and throwing the spoon in the bin…
• Automatic processing is inevitable and, once activated, runs to completion.

Question 13

divided attention

Answer 13

• Divided attention refers to doing more than one thing at a time.
  
  • Three factors influence the extent to which two tasks can be successfully carried out simultaneously:
    1. How similar the tasks are: overlap at any stage (input/ storage/ processing/ output will create problems.
    2. How practiced the operator is: Spelke et al (1976).
    
    3. How difficult the tasks are: difficult to disentangle difficulty from practice.

Question 14

summary

Answer 14

• There are multiple different conceptions of attention, some as a process others as a resource
  
  • Attention may be related to but is separable from consciousness (also memory, intention, action…
  • Selective attention refers to our ability to focus on a subset of sensory input (typically acoustic or visual)
  • Attention has an essential role in feature binding; Conjoint searches require serial processing
  • The extent to which unattended information is processed can vary as a function of its properties (bottom up) and our goals / intentions (top down).
• The ability to divide attention is dependent on the similarity, practice, and difficulty.