WEEK 8 ATTENTION

Module 1: Introduction to Attention Attention allows you to navigate through a crowded world brimming with information and distractions. Nowhere is this more evident than when crossing the street at Shibuya Station in downtown Tokyo, reportedly the world's busiest street crossing. Of course, you need the ability to focus your attention for more than just crossing a busy street intersection. Without the ability to focus your limited processing resources, you wouldn't be able to carry on a meaningful conversation, enjoy a piece of music, understand a joke, or learn new things. Phenomenon Model Hypothesis The study of attention covers a seemingly wide range of topics, and psychologists have found it challenging to put forth a single all-encompassing operational definition. One which suits our purposes comes from the 19th century psychologist William James. William James - Wrote about the topic of attention: Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind in clear form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought...It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state. At the centre of this definition is the concept of selection. That is, attending top something causes the object of attention to be selected apart from the rest of the unattended objects. When you first put on your clothes, you can feel the fabric as it touches your skin. As you go on with your day, you are no longer aware of these sensations as they fade into the background noise of stimuli competing for your attention. Some stimuli in the environment can trigger your attention in an automatic fashion. For example, if a light flashes in your periphery, as one just did, you can't help but have your attention drawn to it. Attention also refers to our conscious ability to attend to the information that is relevant to our goals. When you walk down a crowded sidewalk, drive through busy traffic, or try to find a particular product on the grocery store shelf, you are actively selecting where to focus your attention. The irrelevant information in the environment acts as noise that can make it difficult to identify and attend to important information. Nevertheless, we are remarkably adept at the distinguishing the relevant from the irrelevant information in the environment. Even so, sometimes the noise overwhelms the signal and you get distracted. For example, your leisurely walk down a crowded sidewalk becomes more difficult when you're looking for a lost friend in the crowd; your drive through traffic becomes more difficult as you engage in an important call on your cell phone; finding your favourite groceries becomes more challenging when you are in a foreign market filled with strange new foods. Module 2: Automatic and Controlled Attention Automatic Process: Involuntarily by external events, trigger capture of attention, fast, efficient Controlled Process: Guide attention voluntarily, require cognitive effort, operate more slowly

Example: Driving a car through busy traffic. While driving, you consciously choose to pay attention to many aspects of the environment to guide this goal-directed behaviour. Here, you are using flexible controlled processes involved in conscious attention as you choose when to make lane changes, speed up, slow down, engage in a conversation or change the radio station. Why do you turn down the radio when looking for a new address or making a driving decision? Because this demonstrates that it's difficult to consciously attend to many aspects of the taskenvironment at the same time because the resources for controlled processes are limited. Using automatic processes in the task of driving, it took a lot of effort to learn how to perform tasks such as turning or pressing the gas pedal but with time and effort you get the hang of it. We know that some cues seem to be more noticeable and lead to stronger and quicker association when paired with events. This is the notion of salience which means that a piece of information is one that appears to naturally pop-out at you. For example, it's hard to miss the loud sounds and flashing lights of an emergency vehicle. This information just seems to automatically capture your attention whether you intended to or not. Module 3: The Spotlight Model Michael Posner: Just as a psychical spotlight illuminates only part of the stage at a time, your attentional spotlight focuses on only part of the environment at a time. Attention can be consciously directed across the visual scene as you look for your friend at the crowded after-party. Attention can also be hijacked by unconscious processes that can quickly grab your attention so you can avoid an oncoming speeding car as you step off the sidewalk. As your attention moves around your field of vision, objects falling within the spotlight are processed preferentially: you can respond to objects faster and with greater accuracy. Here is what a typical trial in an experiment using the spatial cueing paradigm looks like. As a subject, you are asked to fix your attention to the middle box on the screen. At some point, a target will appear in either the left of right box. It is your job to indicate the correct target location as quickly as possible. However there is a slight twist: Just before the target appears, a potential target box briefly flashes. The flashing box serves as a cue for your attention. The target can then follow in either the cued or uncued location. In one experiment, the target appears randomly on either the left or right target box, and is equally often cued or uncued. In such an arrangement, the cue actually provides no predictive information about where the target will appear. We can then compare how quickly the subject detects the target. For example, let's consider all the trials in which the target appears in the left box; we find that target dettection is quicker when it is correctly cued than when it is uncued. This set-up of the experiment suggests that this difference in target detection is governed by automatic rather than the conscious control of attention. This result suggests that the cue automatically attracts the attentional spotlight to the cued location. If a target appears in the cued location, then attention will amplify the perceptual processing of that target and it will be detected quickly. But if a target appears in the uncued (and therefore unattended location)

the target will be detected more slowly because the attentional spotlight will have been directed away from the actual target location. This translates into a measurable difference in target detection in the cued and uncued trials. Consciously controlled shifts of attention can lead to faster responses to targets that appear in the location indicated by the cue than to targets that appear opposite the location indicated by the cue. Module 4: Filter Models Colin Cherry: Conducted classic experiments on the cocktail party effect in which subjects were asked to listen to two different messages played from a single loudspeaker at the same time. Subjects tried to separate the messages, repeating one but not the other, in a so-called shadowing task. Cherry's work revealed that the ability to separate target sounds from background noise is based on physical characteristics, such as the gender of the speaker and the direction, pitch, or speed of the speech. Information Filter Further Processing Donald Broadbent: Proposed first filter model of attention. He used data from behavioural experiments to infer the functional stages of cognitive processing. According to his model, the attentional filter selects important information on the basis of physical characteristics, and allows that information to continue on for further processing. Broadbent furthered Cherry's experiment by using the dichrotic listening paradigm. One would put on headphones and listen to a different message directed into each ear; your job is to shadow the message in the attended ear by repeating back the message. Most subjects seem to process almost no information from the unattended ear but the questions concerning the content of the attended message has no problem. The attention filter allows only information arriving through the attended ear to proceed to deeper processing. Von Wright & Colleasgues: Suggests that in fact some information is processed in the unattended ear. Some information about sound and meaning is able to pass through the filter, a finding that Broadbent would not predict. Breakthrough: Participants are able to remember important information in the unattended stream. This is particularly common when the unattended information is highly relevant. Imagine that I am at a loud party having a conversation with an old friend. There are many distracting sounds from other conversations around me, so I must filter out all but own conversation. However, if someone happens to say my name aloud in the crowd, this information is likely to break through and capture my attention. Physical Characteristics Early Filter (Attentuation) Late Filter (Semantic Analysis) Selected input for attention In the physical filter information is evaluated based on physical cues such as intensity or pitch to find the most relevant signal. Through the semantic filter, it is evaluated for meaning. The semantic filter considers the deeper meaning and relevance of stimuli, and chooses which information will be attended to, while the rest of the information is discarded.

Module 5: The Stroop Task The stroop task was first described in 1935 and has been one of the most popular tasks in attention research. It produces an effect that's almost impossible to avoid. In the stroop task, participants are presented with a colourword and asked to name the ink-colour in which the word is presented. There are two kinds of items: Congruent: Contain matching word and colour dimensions, for example the word RED written in the ink-colour red. Incongruent: Contain mismatching word and colour dimensions, for example the word BLUE written in the ink-colour green. Performance is much faster for congruent than incongruent items The paradigm requires you to attend to information on the task-relevant dimension, and to ignore the information on the task-irrelevant dimension. The difference in performance between incongruent and congruent trials can serve as an empirical measure of processes involved in selective attention. On congruent trials, the word and colour match, and so word reading facilitates colour naming performance. On incongruent trials, the word and colour mismatch, and in this case word-reading interferes with colour naming performance. To measure conscious control over stroop interference researchers use a proportion congruent manipulation. Proportion congruent manipulation: Change the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials For example, in a high proportion congruent block of trials, subjects receive 75% cognruent and 25% incongruent trials. This condition has more easy trials leads to an increase in stroop effect. In a low proportion congruent block of trials, subjects receive 25% congruent and 75% incongruent. The greater number of more difficult trials leads to a decrease in stroop effect. (Congruent) RED Word-reading facilitates colour naming (Incongruent) BLUE Word-reading impedes colour naming Employing a conscious strategy to attend to the word dimension usually provides the correct response. This strategy increases performance on the congruent trials when one receives a stimulus that they were expecting. The performance on incongruent trials would be slower because they would be consciously attending to the word, and the word dimension for incongruent stimuli does not provide the correct response/ This strategy leads to an overall larger Stroop effect. In a low proportion block of trials, the word dimension usually does not match the ink-colour dimension. In this case, you may actively try to ignore the word dimension entirely, as the word hardly ever provides the correct response. Consciously promoting this strategy leads to a smaller Stroop effect. The stroop task allows us to measure both automatic and controlled processes. Automatic: Evidence Word reading influences performance even when the word is to be ignored. Controlled: Evidence People can adopt consciously controlled word reading strategies that modulate the Stroop effect.

Changes in the strength of the Stroop effect may reflect the operation of different kinds of attentional filters that are responsible for attenuating word reading processes. In this manner, the Stroop task constitutes a first example of an experimental task that researchers use to develop theories about the processes involved in attention. Module 6: Visual Search Designed to test how we use everyday attention. In a visual search task, subjects look for a target in an array of distracters. This task is analogous to tasks you perform every day: from looking for your keys, to locating your friend in a crown, to studying your notes for a certain key word. Set Size: The number of items to search through Set Size Effect: Increase in difficulty as set size increases Finding a T in an array of i's is a single feature search task; you only have to look for one particular feature to identify the target, in this case a horizontal line which distinguishes a T from the field of is. Colour is a much easier feature to search for. Pop-Out Effect: Rapid visual search regardless of set size and easily induced by colour Conjunction Search Task: Identifying a target that is defined by two or more features. For example, try to find a green T in a grid full of green I's, red T's and red I's. Searching for both the colour green and letter T together makes the task significantly more difficult. Context can come from any number of sources, but in general we gain it by knowing something about our world. If you know that you usually put your keys on the right side of your desl, you'll probably start by looking there, enabling you to find it much quicker. Module 7: Conclusion The importance of attention is perhaps best appreciated when things go wrong. Attentional errors can lead to minor everyday inconveniences, like when you forget to put the milk back in the fridge. Chronic attentional errors can play a role in psychological problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, insomnia, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Perhaps the most severe clinical case involves the odd condition of hemispatial neglect. A person with damage to right parietal lobe of the brain may continue to see objects to the left, yet fail to pay full attention to them. Remarkably, this may lead to the odd behaviour of only eating the food on the righthand-side of the plate or only shaving half their face.