Phenomenon → Model → Hypothesis

William James
● Quote: Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind in
clear and vivid 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.

Selection: The act of attending to an object to select it apart from the unattended objects.
● Example: 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 unless
of course something triggers you to pay attention to the feeling of your clothes again.

Automatic Processes: “Involuntary ‘capture’; Fast, efficient.

● Automatic processes are triggered involuntarily by external events which often trigger
the “capture” of attention, like when your attention quickly gets directed toward the
sirens of an ambulance. Automatic processes are assumed to operate in a fast,
efficient, and obligatory manner

Controlled Processes: “Conscious attention; Slow, effortful”.

● Controlled processes guide attention voluntarily and consciously to objects of
interest. Controlled processes operate more slowly because they are assumed to
require more cognitive effort.

● It’s difficult to consciously attend to many aspects of the task-environment at the

same time because the resources for controlled processes are limited.
○ When driving and you lower volume if driving is difficult

● Second type of automatic process related to learning

○ At first, it took a lot of your effort to do all of these tasks in the correct
sequence. However, with enough practice, you can now accomplish all these
little tasks without very much effort at all.

● According to psychologist Michael Posner, there’s an analogous process for visual

attention.
○ As your attention moves around your field of vision, objects falling within the
spotlight are processed preferentially: meaning you can respond to objects
faster and with greater accuracy.
● 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
■ The spotlight model suggests that attention would enhance the
processing of visual information from the single flower relative to the
grass. Alternatively, filter models suggest that attention helps us
ignore or ‘block’ the visual information from the grass, allowing the
single flower to continue on for further processing.

● According to Broadbent’s early Single Filter Model, the attentional filter selects
important information on the basis of physical characteristics, and allows that
information to continue on for further processing. Information that does not pass
through the early physical filter was assumed to be completely eliminated and
unavailable for deeper analysis for meaning and semantic importance.
○ Broadbent extended Cherry's work using the dichotic listening paradigm. If
you were a participant in a typical experiment, you would put on headphones
and listen to a different message directed into each ear; your job would be to
shadow the message in the attended ear by repeating back the message.
■ A limitation of Broadbent’s model is that it assumes that there is
absolutely no additional processing of unattended signals

● A clever experiment by Von Wright and colleagues suggests that in fact some
information is processed even in the unattended ear. In the first part of the study, a
classical conditioning paradigm is used to associate a particular word with an electric
shock to produce fear conditioning. The second part of the study was conducted as a
dichotic listening experiment. When participants heard a word similar in sound or
meaning to the conditioned word in their attended ear, they reacted with a
conditioned fear response as would be expected.

● Another challenge to Broadbent’s Single Filter model comes from the phenomenon of
“breakthrough”, which occurs when participants are able to notice important
information in an unattended stream.
○ Hearing your name in another conversation

● Information first passes through the physical filter. Here, information is evaluated
based on physical cues, such as intensity or pitch to find the most relevant signal.
Treisman’s physical filter weights the importance of incoming stimuli based on these
 physical cues and passes along all the information to the semantic filter. So a
brighter or louder stimulus will be given a higher weight than a dim or quiet stimulus.
○ As the information passes through the semantic filter, it is evaluated for
meaning. The semantic filter takes into account the weights assigned by the
physical filter, considers the deeper meaning and relevance of the stimuli, and
chooses which information will be attended to, while the rest of the
information is discarded.

● In contrast, Treisman’s dual filter model better accounts for the breakthrough effect
because it assumes that the early filter only attenuates or ‘weights’ the incoming
sensory information based on physical characteristics, then the late filter processes
the resulting information in terms of meaning or semantics to determine what
ultimately gets selected for attention.

● The Stroop Task is one of the most popular tasks in attention research, having been
used in well over 1000 published studies since the task was first described in 1935.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Stroop Task is that it produces an effect
that’s almost impossible to avoid.
● The trick is that the word is a colour, like the word “red”. In this task, here are two
types of test items participants are presented with.
○ Congruent, where the word and the colour it’s displayed in are matched
○ Incongruent, where the word and the colour it is displayed in do not match.

● 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 font colour match, and so word reading
facilitates colour naming performance.
○ On incongruent trials, the word and font colour mismatch, and since word
reading proceeds relatively automatically, then in this case the automatic
word-reading interferes with colour naming performance.

● If words keep appearing not matching colour

○ In this case, you adopt an alternative strategy to actively ignore the word and
instead process font colour on its own. Simply put, the infrequent benefit that
you receive from reading the word on congruent trials does not justify how
often it leads you astray on incongruent trials, and so you opt to take the
slightly slower yet Stroop-reduced route. That is, consciously suppressing
your tendency to read the word, and instead promoting the processing of font
colour, which leads to a smaller Stroop effect.

● Visual search experiments are designed to test how we use everyday attention. In a
visual search task, subjects look for a target in an array of distractors.
○ This task is analogous to tasks you perform every day: from looking for your
keys, to locating your friend in a crowd, to studying your notes for a certain
keyword.