Attention

Four interrelated ideas of attention

1.We are constantly confronted with much more information than we can okay attention to

2.There are serious limitations in how much we can attend to at any one time

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

4.With sufficient practice and knowledge, some task become less and less demanding of our attention process

Four meanings of attention

-Alertness and arousal

-Orientation and searching

-Filtering and selecting

-Mental resources and conscious processing

Basics of attention

Attention as a mental process: attention can be though of as the mental process of concentrating effort on a stimulus or a mental event

-Attention is an activity that occurs within the cognitive system – a process

This process focuses a mental commonality –effort- on either an external stimulus or an internal event, first identification of the pattern relies almost exclusively on data driven processing, whereas later identification relies heavily on conceptually driven processing -Ambiguous picture like the Dalmatian -> you are reduced to data driven processing-> mental effort in attempt to find the pattern -> this is effort is attention

-Attention is a mental process that focused your eyes on the figure and encoded the photograph into your visual system, attention focused on driving your mental event of remembering, searching for information stored in your long term memory, attempting to comprehend

Attention as a limited mental resource Pmental fuel)

Attention is the limited mental energy or resource that powers the mental system -> used to run the cognitive system

Notion of limitations: attention is limited Pto attend to stimuli, to remember events, to remember things we are supposed to do)

There’s a limit to how many different things we can attend to and do all at once

Alertness and arousal

-Basic capacity to respond to the environment, nervous system must be awake, responsive and ready to interact with the environment, nervous system must be aroused in order to pay attention

-Arousal is at least partly a function of the reticular Activational system (RAS)

-Certain stimuli can impinge Pimpact) us and arouse us Pan alarm clock) – can last long periods of time or change gradually; such changes are referred to as tonic: sleep –wakefulness cycles is the best known tonic changes in alertness and arousal, another example of tonic change in arousal is the fatigue or loss of vigilance we encounter when performing a task Plike driving) for long periods of time

Phasically: controls alertness and arousal, an example of phasic arousal might occur when a sudden unexpected change in the environment is detected, for example a drop in vigilance after a long trip, you may get drowsy while stopped at a red light and the driver behind you beeps, the loud horn will cause an abrupt, phasic increase in your state of arousal Pheart rate will increase) ALSO phasic change in alertness and arousal can be produced voluntarily as when you use a warning signal to prepare to encode and respond to an upcoming target stimulus

Explicit processes: are those involving conscious processing, conscious awareness that a task is being preformed and usually conscious awareness of the outcome of performance. PWordlist remember then name them back)

Implicit processing Popposite): processing with no necessary involvement of conscious awareness Preread something you’ve already saw more quickly, even if you don’t remember) -An example read lists of words to patients before and during surgery, then asked then if they remember 24 hour later, patients still remembered the words even if they were unconscious during surgery – based on an implicit memory task Pthe word stem completion task), patients completed the words stems more frequently with words they had heard during surgery the presurgery- patients had implicit memory of the word lists they had heard while they were under the anesthesia

Orientating and searching

Orienting refers to the alignment of information pickup mechanism with a source of information

2 types: sometimes referred to bottom up and top down processing Reflexively: in response to sudden change in the environment

Voluntarily: in response to our own actions

Voluntary orientation or reflexive control orienting involves may involve overt responses such as eyes and head movement or in absence of an observable behavioral response, orientating may involve an internal mental change that is called covert orienting of attention Pmental changes)

Reflexive orienting

-loud noise grabs your attention and involves a reflexive turning of your head towards the source Orienting reflex or orienting response: the reflexive redirection of attention that orients you towards the unexpected stimulus, Peye and head movements)

-Is initiated by external stimulation and involved the redirection of sensory receptors towards the source of stimulation

Overt reflexive orientating When such an orienting reflex can be observed in the behavior of the organism

Covert reflexive orienting: orienting of attention without the assistance of an overt response, when ones eyes and head remain stationary unexpected events can elicit reflexive redirection of attention in the form of internal Pmental) adjustments of information processing,

Both cover and overt orienting reflex are location –finding responses of the nervous system – The orienting reflex enables you to protect yourself against danger, in the reflexive survival sense Pneural pathways involved in this response correspond to the where pathway/dorsal pathway)

-Orienting is a preparatory response one that preps the system for further voluntary processing

-Orienting focuses the organism so it can devote deliberate attention to the stimulus if warranted -> Voluntary attentive processes

if the stimulus that triggered the orienting reflex then occurs again and again ->habituation begins to take over: a gradual reduction of the orienting response back to baseline

Cowan: believes there are two categories of stimuli that trigger the orienting reflex:

1.Stimuli that are significant to the person Prock thrown at head)

2.Stimuli that are novel Pdifferences that stick out)

Voluntary orienting

Situations we choose the objects o locations in space that we want to analyze or pay attention to

We can have covertly voluntary orienting Pday dreaming)
Voluntary covert orienting: voluntary shifts of attention made without overt shifts in gaze
Look at the two paradigms for exploring orienting page 327 **

-The advantage on valid relative to neutral trails is known as benefit

The disadvantage on invalid relative to neutral trials is known as a cost
Conclude from this and related experiments that the additional focus the subjects were switching was a thoroughly cognitive phenomenon, it was not tied to eye movement or other overt behavior, but to the internal mechanism, also attention can be likened to spotlight that enhances the efficiency of detection of events within its beam

-So the spot light attention is the covert focusing of attention that prepares you to encode stimulus information

Among scholars who study covert visual orienting, it is generally assumed that there is one mental spotlight of attention that is control by bottom up Preflexive) and top down Pvoluntary) processes
The differences between reflexive and voluntary covert visual orienting seem simply to reflect the properties of the different controllers: reflexive orienting is faster, less influenced by target probabilities and less affected by giving the subjects a secondary memory task,

-Attention is facilitated by the cue – Confusing 329 ask friends

In the 200-300 msec there is a cross over in functions and the RT to validly cued target becomes slower than the invalidly cued targets-> this phenomenon is called the “inhibition of return” once attention is removed from a recently attended location it is inhibited from returning there Pinhibition is a mental process that restrains behavior or impedes another mental process) – this doesn’t happen when after following a voluntary shift -“Been there done that”

Visual search

Top-down and bottom-up control of attention Pexample when your looking for a pen on a desk must used top down attention and bottom up attention for your representation of the pen) -Spotlight attention in terms of visual search and pattern recognition, example like in the book “look for bold letter T”. Another example is by Treisman look for a letter that is either blue or an S, the search for a simple feature was called disjunction condition Peither blue or S) in the conjunction condition they had to look for both.

For disjunction condition there was no difference in response time across the display sizes Pno difference btw 5-30 red or Y) -> they concluded that visual research for a dimension such as shape or Colour occurs in parallel across the entire region of visual attention
But when people had to search for a conjunction of features Pgreen T) they took much longer
This all depends on distractors patterns much easier in example 1 then 2

Treisman’s two conditions provided a clear evidence of both a very quick, automatic attentional process Pessentially the capture of attention due to pop out)- and the much slower, serial and more deliberate attention the type needed for the conjunction.

Each search mode has both reflexive and voluntary components
The important result is that disjunctive search times did not increase as the display grew larger but the conjunction search times did, the linear increasing functions relating response time to display size and the roughly 2:1 ratio in target slops have been used to infer a serial self terminating research

-Top down and bottom up processing make prevent re-inspection by using the activation map that controls orienting

Filtering: voluntary control of selective attention

Control attention: refers to forms of processing in which there is a deliberate, voluntary allocation of mental effort or concentration

Research in action, inhibition of return: facilitates research by discouraging re-inspection Inhibition of return (IOR): facilitates serial search by discouraging attention form revisiting previously inspected objects or regions of the search display

-IOR should be present at the locations if items following serial search when the target was absent Pbecause attention would have visited the location of each of these items- following a research for a target that pops out, IOR should not be present because attention is not needed to find the target in this kind of search

For IOR to facilitate research, it must have the following properties:

1.IOR is not retinotopic Prelative to the current fixation point) but rather is coded environmentally when an eye movement intervenes between a cue and target and is coded in object coordinates when the item that was cued moves before the target is presented

2.IOR should be graded, such that the inhibited regions are neither too small nor too large to be useful

3.IOR would be relatively useless as a search facilitator if only one object or location could be inhibited, Pratt and Adams found that up to five locations could be simultaneously inhibited when they used an eight item array

4.The duration of IOR must be long enough to be effective over the duration of a typical visual search P3 seconds)

5.IOR must being very quickly after attention has inspected an item in a search array

-Neuroscientific data suggests the IOR is present from the onset of the cue; its impact on performance may not be strong enough to overcome the early facilitation from reflexive attention until attention has been removed from the cued location

Selective attention and the cocktail party affect

Filtering or selecting: the mental process of eliminating those distractions, eliminating unwanted messages

-When you try to ignore the many stimuli or events around you so you can focus on just one, the ones you are trying to ignore are distraction that must be eliminated or excluded

Dual task procedures

-Two tasks or massages are presented such that one task or message consumes the person’s attentional resources as completely as possible

Shadowing experiments

Colin Cherry was interested in speech recognition and attention, he recorded spoken messages, the subjects were asked to shadow the messages coming into the right ear that is to repeat the message out loud as soon as it was heard, or there were told to ignore, the left or right ear does not make a difference -> results: subjects shadows were always in a monotone voice and lagged behind the massage, they also had a hard time remembering the content of their shadows but could remember accurately a variety of physical characteristics of the unattended message but not the actual context itself Pie only if it was female or male) even a word present 35 times in the unattended message was never recalled by the subjects

-Cherry’s findings that selective attention was easy when various physical differences existed between the messages

Selection models

Stage 1 selection: early selection, to some of the earliest phases of perception, an acoustic analysis based on the physical features of the message, sensory information – based on loudness, location of the sound, pitch and so on

Broadbent’s filter theory

This theory claims that subjects could somehow tune their auditory mechanism to one message and ignore the other to propose a filter theory of auditory perception

-In Broadbent’s view, the auditory mechanism acts as a selective filter, filtering one message at a time, the filter can be tuned or switched to any one of the messages, based on characteristics such as loudness or pitch, this one message is sent along a filter into the “limit- capacity decision channel”-> leads to response of long term memory store – THIS APPROACH HAS SOME

SERIOUS PROBLEMS

-For example we often notice information from message we are not attending ie. When we hear our name Punattended info can slip through the filter) some small part of attention can be attributed to unattended stimuli

Treisman’s attenuation theory

The basis for the selection however was not any physical characteristic of the message instead, subjects now performed their selection on the basis of the message content, what the message was about rather that what it sounded like

-This is called stage 2 selection/middle selection: in which grammatical and sematic Pmeaning) features are the basis for selection

-Early selection is based on sensory features; middle selection is based on understanding -The shadowing task example when the meaning/ second half of the sentence switched ears.

-Although subjects did not continue to shadow the wrong ear for very long, when the meaningful sentence switched to the other ear, they also switched.

-There must be some consideration of the unattended message, unlike the prediction from Broadbent’s theory. Sematic elements of the unattended channel must be receiving some analysis.

-Treisman rejected the “early selection” notion embodied in Broadbent’s theory, instead she claimed that all incoming message received some amount of low level analysis, including an analysis of the physical characteristic of the messages.

-Treisman felt that it was during this process of semantic analysis that we make our selection among messages – at stage 2 selection “middle stage” this permits attention to be affected by the semantic aspect of the message Ptop down affect)

This was a late selection theory, at stage 3 –terminology, where outcomes of all earlier analyses become conscious.

-So the evidence is that much more information is getting into the cognitive system than strict selection or filtering would permit

Norman’s Pertinence model

Donald Norman proposed a useful modification to the Treisman scheme; his model which specifically included a mechanism for top down processing. This model claims that at any instant time, attention to some pieces of information Psome messages) is determines by two factors: sensory activation and pertinence

Sensory activation: activates your senses, if the message is loud, in a distinct voice or is salient from a sensory stand point i.e. the stereo at the party is very loud can’t focus on anything else

Pertinence: the momentary importance of information, whether caused by permanent or transitory factors. Somethings are more or less important to you, it can also be temporary

i.e. If you’re listening to a message about the forest trees are pertinent to you. Your name has a high level of pertinence on a permanent basis Pthe higher that item is in pertinence the closer that item is to its criterion or threshold of awareness)

Add these two activations together Psensory and pertinence activation) items in memory have the highest of each, in Norman’s theory selective attention is a continuous process

Multimode model of attention

-Selective attention can occur early in the processing sequence but it can also occur later based on the meaning or message content -> selective attention can be affected by both permanent Phighly important information, our names) and temporary factors Pwhich include message content as well as momentary fluctuations in interest) – IN SHORT ATTENTION IS FLEXIBLE

See figure 15.10 the sequence of processing in the shadow task, with early, middle an late operation of the selective attention mechanism

-Attention is flexible and can be operated in multiple modes Pstages 1,2,3)

-Where does selective attention operate: anywhere! Selection can operate in multiple modes early, middle or late

an important limitation is compacity: the down side to flexibility is that the later slection uses more of our limited attentional capacity, later selection tends to be slower or less accurate when it comes to remembering the information that was attended to.

-Selection attention was more difficult in some conditions because of similarities in the competing messages, this slowed down the detection of the light,

For example: having to listen to one message slowed down light detection by about 60 ms, another example because distractors different both physically and in meaning from the target, this added only another 20 ms to the participants time to detect the light-> it took very little extra attention when given two types of cues, physical and meaning, to help them ignore the distractors Pit is easy to ignore 1 or 2 nearby conversation if they are about different topics)

–The most difficult this to ignore: is when the extra message differs only ohysicallly from the target or when it differs only in meaning

-As our processing operates later and later, extra capacity is consumed by the attentional mechanism. This slows down Pand makes less accurate) any other ongoing process because it subtracts from the total pool of mental resources that are available for performance

Attention as a mental resource

The idea of limited capacity attention

if you are required to process a target stimuli and then immediately process a second target stimuli, processing of the second target may suffer because some of the resource needed to process it may still be operating on the first stimulus

–The attentional blink: when we present a rapid stream of items containing the two targets, accuracy in identifying the second target declined sharply as soon as the two were presented close together in time, when the two targets are adjacent to one another in the stream, the second one can be spared from the deleterious effect of the attentional blink – as if the second target was processed along with the first one before the “blink” took place

The limitation is seen in the attentional blink

-Allocating attention to the first stimulus momentarily deprives you of the attention needed for the second stimulus

–Controlled attention: you decide to pay attention to a signal, for example you decide to pay attention to the lecture instead of your memory of last night’s date and when you realize your attention has wondered, you will willfully refocus your attention to the lecture

-The limited capacity attentional mechanism and the need for filtering in selective attention, the current view is that a variety of perceptual and cognitive processes can be executed in an automatic fashion, with little or no necessary involvement of a conscious, limitedattention mechanism

Automatic processing

Automatic processing: occurs without our awareness usually very fast and without intension

3 characteristics the are necessary for “diagnosis” of an automatic process

Automatic process occurs without intention: in other words an automatic process occurs whether you consciously want it or not Pshown in the stroop task name of color doesn’t mater the actual color the Word BLUE is actually colored red) this leads to tremendous interference, dramatic slowing because of the ink color – can be affected by priming
An automatic process does not reveal itself to conscious awareness, you cannot describe the mental process if looking up the word red in memory, the look un process are automatic and not available to the conscious awareness
Criterion of automaticity: a fully automatic process consumes few if any conscious resources, such process should not interfere with nay other task Pfor example walking, we can walk and talk at the same time)
This is an add on and is informal, the characteristic of automaticity, automatic processes tend to be very fast, as a rule a response taking no more the 1 s is heavily automatic

Conscious? controlled processing: we are aware and can control, this drains the pool of conscious capacity

Occurs with intension Pcan be deliberately performed or not preformed)
Conscious processes are open to awareness Pwe know they are going on)
Conscious process uses attention, they consume the limited attentional resources we have in the cognitive system- leaves little room for other events

The role of practice and memory

Participants in the shadow study were unable to identify the word that was repeated 35 times, this is simply due to the lack of practice, the effect of practice is to store the relevant information in memory, the necessary precondition for automatic processing is memory -Study by Shiffrin and Schneider, processing became automatic but as soon as it changed Pforcing subjects to search for targets that were previously distractors)“automatic detection would prove impossible and that the subjects would be forced to revert to controlled search

A synthesis for attention and automaticity

The more automatic a task can be preformed, the more mental resources are available for other processes

-The rout for automaticity is practice and memory

It is very difficult to undo something that has become automatic

Disadvantage to automaticity

-Very hard to overcome

You must break the habits for example you have to overcome habits when you get a new car like reaching for the left of the dash board to turn lights on, this is why some controls eg. Break and accelerator never change
Sometimes we should be consciously aware of information or processes that have become automatic Pless vigilant if you rely on automaticity) for example Barshi and Healey’s experiment with embedded math errors participants in the varied order did much better then participants in the fixed order – dangerous when fixed ordered lists are use with Pilots

A disorder of attention: Hemineglect

Cognitive neuroscience of attention
Look at examples of deficit hyperactive disorder PADHD) and Hemineglect
The example in the front of the chapter bill suffers from Hemineglect Pbrushing only his right teeth and shaving only the right side of his face)

-Hemineglect/ hemi- inattention is a disturbance in the ability to focus your attention to one side of your face, to the X on the left side of the computer screen. It is a disruption or decreased ability to look at something in the Poften) left field of vision and pay attention to it

-Hemineglect is a disorder of attention in which one half of the perceptual world is neglected to some degree and cannot be attended to as completely or accurately as normal – they useually suffer brain damage to the right hemisphere, patients with Hemineglect cannot voluntarily direct attention to half of the perceptual world, they have a disruption in the ability to control attention, example from the book people with this disorder kept describing only the left side of the piazza in Italy and kept neglecting the left

-It turns out patients with Hemineglect often can attend to stimuli in the neglected field but only if nothing else is displayed visually that might attract their attention

Hemineglect patients have difficulty disengaging attention from that ipsilateral stimulus because right side holds up attention
This tendency to ignore the contralateral field when a competing stimulus is present in the ipsilateral Pthe same side as the brain lesion) field is called Extinction

–Extinction is caused by attentional capture, when a right side stimulus is presented; it captures the person’s attention and prevents attention from being devoted to the left side

For example bill might have been able to focus of shaving the left side of his face if he had not been able to see the right side
The bottom up capture of attention on one side has disrupted a shift of top down, voluntary attention towards the other side
Research found that there were accuracy deficits on the neglected side but capacity difficulties on both sides