Pay Attention!

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Pay Attention!

• Kimberley Clow
• kclow2_at_uwo.ca
• http//instruct.uwo.ca/psychology/130/

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Outline

• What is Attention?
• Orienting
• Cueing Attention
• Visual Search
• Selective Attention
• Dichotic Listening Tasks
• Bottleneck Theories
• Divided Attention
• Capacity Model
• Automatic vs. Controlled Processing
• Visual Neglect

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What Is Attention?

• Definition
• Attention is the process by which the mind
  chooses from among the various stimuli that
  strike the senses at any given moment
• allows only some info to enter into consciousness
• Related Concepts
• Alertness
• Concentration
• Selectivity
• Control

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Big Issues in Attention

• Facts that drive attention research
• We are bombarded by more information than we can
  attend to
• Selective Attention
• Divided Attention
• Automaticity
• Some tasks can be performed with little, if any,
  attention

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Orienting

• We dont passively see or hear
• We actively look and listen
• Different ways to orient to a stimulus
• Overt Orienting
• Covert Orienting
• Attentional Gaze
• Attention can be drawn to a particular location
  independent of where our eyes are looking or our
  ears are oriented

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Cuing Attention

• Give people a cue where a target will appear in
  the visual field
• Manipulate the kind of cue
• Valid Cue
• Neutral Cue
• Invalid Cue
• How does cue affect performance?

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Results

• Different kinds of cues are possible
• Voluntary Orienting
• Endogenous Cue
• Arrow
• Automatic Orienting
• Exogenous Cue
• Flashing light

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Find the T
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Find the T
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Find the Blue Letter
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Find the Blue Letter
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Find the vertical T
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Find the vertical T
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Find the vertical T
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Find the vertical T
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Find the Blue L
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Find the Blue L
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Whats Going On?
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All Searches Are NOT Equal
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(No Transcript)
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A Is More Difficult Than B
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Why Is This Important?
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Is There Trouble?
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Dichotic Listening Task
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Shadowing Results

• Physical attributes of unattended channel are
  detected
• Male vs. female voice
• Human vs. musical instruments
• Semantic attributes of unattended channel were
  missed
• Dont notice foreign language
• Dont notice repeated items

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Filter Theory (Broadbent)
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Cocktail Party Effect
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Attenuation Model (Treisman)

• Present a story in dichotic listening task
• Story switches from attended ear to unattended
  ear
• Participant mistakenly shadows from attended ear
  to unattended ear
• Attended Ear Unattended Ear
• She had peanut butter freaking laser beams
• you keep using that word and jelly sandwiches

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Problems with Early Models

• Memory for unattended channel may depend on
  familiarity or importance
• Cocktail party effect
• There are effects of practice
• There is implicit memory for the unattended
  channel even when there isnt explicit memory
• Shock study
• People can shadow meaningful message that switch
  from ear to ear
• Treisman
• Memory for unattended channel affected by
  similarity to attended channel

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Context Effects

• Attended ear
• They were standing near the bank
• Unattended ear
• One of the following was presented
• river
• money
• Participants interpreted bank as
• a riverbank if they heard river
• a financial bank if they heard money

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Late Selection (Deutsch Deutsch)
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Problems with Late Models

• Even if pertinence is controlled for
• We are more likely to notice effects in the
  attended channel (87)
• We are less likely to notice effects in the
  unattended channel (8)
• If selection is late
• Why do we feel like were consciously selecting
  early?
• Neuro evidence
• Enhanced neural processing at early stages

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Early Filtering (Broadbent)
Filter
Recognition
Detection
Input
Attenuation (Treisman)
Attenuator
Input
Recognition
Detection
Late Filtering (Deutsch Deutsch)
Filter
Input
Detection
Recognition
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Bottleneck Theories

• All information gets into sensory register
• Somewhere along the way, information is filtered
  or selected for attention
• Early
• at perceptual level
• Late
• at response level
• Only selected information makes it into awareness
  and long-term memory

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Divided Attention

• Dual task experiments
• Get people to perform multiple tasks and look at
  the effects on performance
• Often find that performance suffers
• This breakdown of performance when two tasks are
  combined sheds light on the limitations and
  nature of the human information-processing system

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Dual Task Performance

• Divided attention is difficult when
• Tasks are similar
• Tasks are difficult
• When both tasks require conscious attention
• Divided attention is easier when
• Tasks are dissimilar
• Tasks are simple
• When at least one of the tasks does not require
  conscious attention
• Tasks are practiced

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Capacity Theories

• Tasks take mental effort
• We have limited mental effort to allocate to all
  demands on our attention
• Conscious control of allocation
• Some tasks require more attention than others

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Resource Allocation Model (Kahneman)

• What Affects Allocation?
• Resources
• Arousal
• Available Capacity
• Other Effects
• Enduring Dispositions
• Momentary Intentions

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Different Processes

• Some tasks are easier to perform than others and
  dont seem to affect attention
• Especially tasks that are well practiced
• Other tasks are tedious and require our conscious
  attention
• Two types of processing
• Automatic or pre-attentive processing
• Controlled or attentive processing

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An Applied Example
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Neely (1977)

• Priming study, using a lexical decision task
• 4 primes
• BIRD, BODY, BUILDING, XXX
• Manipulated expectancies of the target
• BIRD - types of birds
• BODY - building parts
• BUILDING - body parts
• XXX - bird, body parts, and building parts
  equally often
• Short (e.g., 250ms) and long (e.g., 2,000ms) SOAs

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Neely (1977) Results

• BIRD (expect types of birds)
• BIRD - robin
• facilitation for bird targets at short and long
  SOAs
• BODY (expect building parts)
• BODY - door
• facilitation for building targets at long SOAs,
  but not at short SOAs
• BODY - heart
• inhibition for body targets at long SOAs, but
  facilitation at short SOAs

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Automatic vs. Controlled

• Automatic Processes
• Fast and efficient
• Unavailable to consciousness
• Unavoidable
• Unintentional

• Controlled Processes
• Slow and less efficient
• Available to consciousness
• Controllable
• Intentional

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When Attention Is Lost

• Visual Neglect

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Their Visual Experience
Writing
Reading
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Bisect All the Lines
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Drawings