3.2.

2 The Relationship between Conscious

Controlled Attending
and Automatic Attending
Cherry’s cocktail phenomenon refers to the situation in which
we might be
talking at a party when our attention is suddenly alerted to
someone mentioning
our name from across the room, despite a number of other
competing
conversations in the room. This phenomenon of being alerted
to an ‘unattended’
stimulus posed some questions for the early model-makers in
the area of
attention, for how could a person pick up their name from, say,
eight separate
conversations without monitoring all these separate
conversations
simultaneously? Some theoreticians in the 1970s thought that
all the
conversations in the room were analysed unconsciously for
their meaning, for
surely we would miss our name if these conversations were not
being monitored
at this level. This rather unlikely proposal spawned late
(semantic/meaning)
selection theories of attention (after the physical attributes
have been analysed).
In support of this view there was research that suggested that
we are influenced
by the meaning of information even when we may not be
conscious of that
meaning. For example, in a typical attention task of the 1970s,
using a dichotic
listening task (a different stimulus for each ear), a participant
was required to
monitor the left ear at the expense of other competing
information presented in
the right ear. In this paradigm different stimuli were presented
to each ear. If the
word ‘bank’ is presented to the ‘attended’ ear then the subject
might report the
word ‘bank’ as a place where one could obtain money.
However, if at the same
time the word ‘river’ is presented in the other, ‘unattended’,
ear, then the subject
is more likely to interpret the ambiguous word ‘bank’ as a bank
of a river even
though they were not aware of hearing the word ‘river’ (McKay,
1973).
However, other evidence is suggestive of an earlier stage of
filtering. Thus, if
we are to monitor a message in one ear, we may not become
aware that the topic
of conversation has changed in the other ear but we are aware
if there is a change
to a foreign language (Treisman, 1964). In such a situation it is
the phonological
sounds or the physical structure of the language that has
distracted attention,
suggesting an early filtering system. This disagreement
between models
espousing late (semantic/meaning) and early physical
selection of features (e.g.
phonological/sound) took place in the 1960s and 1970s.
Lavie (1995) argued from a series of experiments that there
has been a trend
for early studies to find early filtering (physical features) of
unattended
information because these studies generally had a high
perceptual load. Later
studies tended to have low perceptual load and tended to
espouse a late model of
filtering (after meaningful analysis). The argument she
supports is that a light
perceptual load allows more spare capacity for the more
exacting analysis
required of the interfering or ‘unattended’ information. This
astute analysis that
is intuitively reasonable has received some support (see review
by Lavie, 2005).
There is also evidence from studies that increase background
interference and
assess the accuracy of the recognition of face repetition. Kong
et al. (2011)
showed that when subjects were sleep deprived they were less
accurate in
recognising the face repetition in a high perceptual load
condition, as one might
expect, but in keeping with Lavie’s proposal they were actually
less interfered
with by increased interference of the background scenes
(through repetition of
the scenes). There was a relationship between perceptual load
and the fusiform
face area activation and the sleep deprived had lower
activation in this area. The
effect of distracting information does nevertheless increase
when the task
requires increased mental manipulation (Konstantinou et al.,
2014), for example,
when someone asks you whether you need more milk when
you are driving
through difficult traffic.
While Lavie’s work reveals that we might be more likely to pick
up our name
at a cocktail party when we are not required to concentrate on
a boring
conversation, this doesn’t really answer the question of how we
can detect our
name from all those other conversations without processing
every conversation
in the room, nor of why we do not pick up other information.
One attractive
partial solution to this conundrum comes from the researchers
Desimone and
Duncan (1995). They have proposed that top-down processing
of the type
mentioned in Chapter 1 on perceptual disorders occurs to
make us more ready to
receive some information at the expense of other information.
This influences
what is being attended to in a competitive process. It is
understood that cells that
represent behaviourally relevant stimuli in our environment
according to past
experience are ready to be activated, while at the same time
other stimuli may be
inhibited. For example, a mother may be alerted by the muted
sounds of her
baby crying but at the same time be unaware of the banging of
a gate in a storm
that is raging outside the house.
This top-down, competitive process is assumed to work even
when we do not
set out to search for a particular target. As in the case of the
baby crying, there
must be a process that allows certain percepts to win the
competition over others.
The process might be described metaphorically as throwing a
number of
different shapes, including stars, circles and squares, on to a
board that only has
slots in the shape of circles. All the shapes will slide off the
perceptual board
except the behaviourally relevant circles, which slot into
position. A
neuropschological answer to this question is likely to involve a
memory process
since we are more likely to be distracted by something that is
well entrenched in
our memory (Le-Hoa Vö et al., 2015) and has been found
rewarding in the past
(Hickey et al., 2014). This top-down perceptual readiness to
receive some
stimuli at the expense of others is not a complete description
of the process. We
are also predisposed to process objects that are novel,
brighter, coloured, well
defined and have motion. Therefore, we may learn to favour
attention to
particular stimuli but there may also be an innate
predisposition to attend to
some stimuli. There is further evidence that some of this
attentional favouring of
some stimuli over others may be consciously controlled. We
can even train
ourselves to look for something in this manner, but it may then
be hard to ignore
that same information when we decide it is no longer relevant
(Desimone and
Duncan, 1995).
Desimone and Duncan’s (1995) competition theory is
persuasive since, from
the evolutionary standpoint, attention and perception must
interact in an efficient
manner. If there is an acceptance that our ability to process
information is
limited, then we should be spending that valuable resource on
things that matter
to us.