11/19/17

Class Announcements
• Group Projects
• Midterm #2
• Next week’s lab
• Come prepared to exercise!

(Preparing Learners for Practice):

Motivation and Attention
Chapter 9

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Intrinsic Motivation
• Internal state or
condition
• Desire, wants
• Directed à goal
• Energizing
• Persistence
• Adequate levels of
motivation cannot be
assumed

Motivation – Characteristics

• Infer through behavior

• Activation
• Persistence + energy level/vigor è overt
behavior
• But… patience à covert behavior
• Ex. Boxer
• Directionality
• Specific Behaviors = Presence of motivation
• Ex. Attend ‘extra’ practice

Motivational Reasons to
Exercise

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Motivational Reasons to
Exercise

Causes of Motivation
• Innate factors
• Trait-centered view of
motivation
• Genetic
• Personality, needs and attitudes
• Acquired factors
• Experiences
• Rewarded
• Combination of innate and
acquired factors

Extrinsic Motivation

Haber & Knutson, 2010; Mir et al., 2011

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Factors Influencing Motivation

• Relevance of task
• Interests, needs, or desires
• Task difficulty
• Too hard = Frustration + anxiety
• Too easy = Boredom
• Perception of control
• Empowerment
• Success in meeting task goals
• Peer-referenced vs. self-referenced

Reward Circuitry

Haber & Knutson, 2010

Nideffer’s Attentional Style

Categories

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Attention

• Psychological construct
• Direction of ‘mental resources’ towards
specific sensory stimuli
• Sensory memory? Working memory?
• Attention as effort or arousal = ‘alerting’
• Sub-conscious attention = ‘bottom-up’
• Ex. Cocktail party effect
• Conscious Attention = ‘top-down’
• Orienting and Executive Control

Arousal

Petersen & Posner, 2012

Orienting

Petersen & Posner, 2012

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Executive Control

Petersen & Posner, 2012

Characteristics of Attentional
Systems
• Selective attention
• Limited resources
• Bottleneck Theory
• Divided Attention
• Central-resource theories
• Are these ‘independent
systems’?
• Can you ‘train’ attention?
• Ex. Meditation for arousal

‘Quiet Eye’ for Visual

Attention
• Quiet eye
• Fixation of gaze
• Initiation of fixed
gaze
• Duration of fixed
gaze
• Length of quiet
eye period

Vickers, 1996

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Neurophysiology of
Somatosensory Attention

Bolton and Staines, 2014; Brown and Staines, 2015