Attention and its Limits

Question 1

What does attention do for us?

Answer 1

• Brains are bombarded with sensory stimuli
• Attention reduces this information overload and
  determines what we perceive

Question 2

Inattentional Blindness

Answer 2

• We overestimate how much of the world we are aware of
• Even very salient (i.e. attention-capturing) things can be missed.

Question 3

Simons & Chabris, 1999 - Gorilla Study (Conditions)

Answer 3

• Transparent/Umbrella
• Transparent/Gorilla
• Opaque/ Umbrella
• Opaque / Gorilla

Question 4

Simons & Chabris, 1999 - Gorilla Study (Video Styles Conditions)

Answer 4

• Transparent: White team + black team, unexpected event all filmed separately + superimposed onto each other
• Opaque: white team + black team, unexpected event all filmed
  simultaneously - people and objects can be occlude

Question 5

Simons & Chabris, 1999 - Gorilla Study (Counting Conditions)

Answer 5

• Easy: count overall number of passes of your team
  – Hard: count aerial and bounce passes of your team separately

Question 6

Simons & Chabris, 1999 - Gorilla Study (Results about Inattentional Blindness)

Answer 6

Can be induced easily in healthy participants
* Occurs more frequently if the display is transparent
* Depends on the difficulty of the task - the more the primary task occupies attention, the less likely
they are to see gorilla/umbrella.

Means –> attention is a limited
resource that you
distribute

Question 7

Central Capacity Theory (Kahneman, 1973)

Answer 7

• A single central capacity (e.g., central executive; attention) that
  can be used flexibly
  – Strictly limited resources
  – Single pool shared between competing tasks
  – Dual-task costs will emerge when two tasks exceed the total resource available