Attention

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Attention
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The meaning of attention

• Term attention doesnt mean the same thing to all
  people
• We apply the term attention to a huge range of
  phenomena, from the basic notion of arousal and
  alertness all the way up to consciousness and
  awareness.
• Attention the mental process of concentrating
  effort on a stimulus or mental event an activity
  that occurs within the cognitive system, a
  process.

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Types of attention

• Input Attention
• Alertness or arousal
• Orienting reflex or response
• Spotlight attention
• Controlled Attention
• Selective attention
• Mental resources and conscious processing
• Supervisory attentional system

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4 interrelated ideas about attention

• First, we are constantly confronted with much
  more information than we can pay attention to
• Second, there are serious limitations in how much
  we can attend to any at one time
• Third, we can respond to some information and
  perform some tasks with little if any attention
• Fourth, with sufficient practice and knowledge,
  some tasks become less and less demanding of our
  attentional processes.

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Basic characteristics of attention

• Attention is a mental process that requires
  mental resources to direct and focus mental
  processes
• These mental resources are limited the more
  attention one tasks requires the less available
  for performing others

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Alertness and Arousal

• The nervous syytem must be awake, responsive, and
  able to interact with the environment
• Input Attention The basic processes of getting
  sensory information into the cognitive system.
• Explicit Processing Involving conscious
  processing, conscious awareness that a task is
  being performed, and usually conscious awareness
  of the outcome of that performance.
• Implicit Processing Processing in which there
  is no necessary involvement of conscious
  awareness.

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Reflexive Attention and the Orienting Response
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Posners results
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Reflexive Attention and the Orienting Response
(cont.)

• Posners Spatial cuing task
• Benefit/Facilitation A faster-than-baseline
  response resulting from the useful advance
  information
• Cost A response slower than baseline because of
  the misleading cue
• Spotlight attention The mental
  attention-focusing mechanisms that prepares you
  to encode stimulus information.
• Posner concluded from this and related
  experiments that the attentional focus subjects
  were switching was a thoroughly cognitive
  phenomenon it was not tied to eye movements or
  other overt behavior but to an internal focusing
  mechanism.

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Treismans Visual Search In this panel, search
either for a capital T or a boldfaced letter. In
the following illustrations, search for a
boldfaced capital T.
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Treismans Visual Search
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Treismans Visual Search
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Contrasting Input and Controlled Attention

• Treismans two conditions provided clear evidence
  of both a very quick, automatic attentional
  process and a much slower, more deliberate
  attention, the type used for the conjunction
  search. Input attention is the fast, automatic
  process of attention and the slower one is
  controlled attention.

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Contrasting Input and Controlled Attention
(cont.)

• Spotlight attention appears to be rapid,
  automatic, and perceptual. It is thereby
  distinguished from the slower, controlled or
  conscious attention process that matches the more
  ordinary connotation of the term attention.
• Conscious or controlled attention prepares us to
  respond in a deliberate way to the environment.
  It is slower, operates in a more serial fashion,
  and is especially influenced by conceptually
  driven processes.

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In conclusionattention

• Three basic senses of the term attention refer to
  alertness and arousal, the orienting reflex, and
  the spotlight of attention. These correspond to
  input attention, a fast process involved in
  encoding environmental stimuli into the mental
  system.

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Controlled, Voluntary Attention

• Controlled Attention Forms of processing in
  which there is a deliberate, voluntary allocation
  of mental effort or concentration.
• Selective Attention The ability to attend to
  one source of information while ignoring or
  excluding ongoing messages around us.

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Selective Attention and the Cocktail Party Effect

• Filtering or selecting 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 distractions that must be eliminated
  or excluded. The mental process of eliminating
  those distractions, eliminating unwanted
  messages, is called filtering or selecting.

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Selective Attention and the Cocktail Party Effect
(cont.)

• Shadowing Task
• A task devised by E. Colin Cherry. In this
  task, Cherry recorded spoken messages of
  different sorts on tape, then played the tape to
  a subject who was wearing headphones. The
  subjects task was to shadow or repeat the
  message to the right ear out loud as soon as it
  was heard. In most of the experiments, subjects
  were also told to ignore the other message, the
  one coming to the left ear.
• Conclusions Subjects could report accurately
  on a variety of physical characteristics of the
  unattended (left ear) message, but were unable to
  notice other things about it.

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Broadbents Filter Theory

• In Broadbents view, the auditory mechanism acts
  as a selective filter regardless of how many
  competing channels or messages are coming in, the
  filter can be tuned, or switched, to any one of
  the messages, based on characteristics such as
  loudness or pitch.

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Broadbents filter theory of selective attention
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Treismans Attenuation Theory

• Treisman rejected the early selection notion
  embodied in Broadbents theory. Instead, she
  claimed that all incoming messages receive some
  amount of low-level analysis, including the
  analysis of the physical characteristics of the
  message. When the unattended messages yield no
  useful or important information, those messages
  are attenuated they are weakened in their
  importance to ongoing processing.

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Normans Pertinence Model

• Donald Norman proposed a useful modification to
  the Treisman scheme his model specifically
  included a mechanism for top-down processing.
  The model claims that at any instant in time,
  attention to some piece of information, some
  message, is determined by two factors, sensory
  activation and pertinence.
• Pertinence The momentary importance of
  information, whether caused by permanent or
  transitory factors.

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Selection Models

• Two things about selection attention
• First, selective attention can occur very early
  in the processing sequence, based on very
  low-level, physical characteristics, as Broadbent
  proposed.
• Second, it can be influenced by both permanent
  and temporary factors. Permanent factors include
  highly important information such as your name
  and highly overlearned and personally important
  factors.

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Automatic and Conscious Processing Theories

• Automaticity Occurring without conscious
  awareness or intention and consuming little if
  any of the available mental resources.
• Two explicit theories of automaticity have been
  proposed, one by Posner and Snyder, and one by
  Shiffrin and Schneider. They differ in some of
  their details but are similar in their overall
  message.

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Posner and Schneiders 3 characteristics of an
automatic process

• 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 that is, it consumes little if any
  conscious attention.

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Conscious Processing

• The process occurs only with intention, with a
  deliberate decision
• The process is open to awareness and
  introspection
• The process uses conscious resources that is, it
  drains the pool of conscious attentional capacity

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Automatic and Conscious Processing

• The Role of Practice and Memory
• Shiffrin and Schneiders theory of automatic and
  conscious processing stresses the role of
  repetitive practice.

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Attention and Automaticity

• Attention is essentially conscious mental
  resources we can devote these attentional
  resources to only one demanding task at a time or
  to two less demanding tasks, as long as the two
  together do not exceed the total capacity
  available.
• The route to automaticity is practice and memory.
  With repetition and overlearning comes the
  ability to perform in an automatic fashion what
  formerly needed conscious processing.

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Disadvantages of Automaticity

• Mental processes become more automatic as a
  function of practice and overlearning. A
  disadvantage of automaticity is that it is
  difficult to reverse the effects of practice in
  an automated task, and automaticity can lead to
  errors of inattention.

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A Disorder of Attention Hemineglect

• Hemineglect A disruption or decreased ability
  to look at something in the (often) left field of
  vision and pay attention to it. Thus,
  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.

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Drawings copied by a patient with contralateral
neglect
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Hemineglect, in conclusion

• This order of attention which shows how the
  attentional system can be affected by brain
  damage, thus informing us about normal attention.
  In hemineglect, the patient is unable to direct
  attention voluntarily shift attention to the
  neglected side of space
• The evidence suggests that this arises from an
  inability to disengage attention from a stimulus
  on the nonneglected side, hence disrupting the
  process of shifting attention to the opposite
  side.