ATTENTION

AND
CONSCIOUSNESS
Attention is the means by which we
actively process a limited amount of
information from the enormous amount of
information available through our senses,
our stored memories, and our other
cognitive processes.
Consciousness includes both the feeling
of awareness and the content of
awareness, some of which may be under
the focus of attention.
Conscious attention serves three purposes in
playing a causal role for cognition.
1. It helps monitoring our interactions
with the environment.
2. It assists us in linking our past
(memories) and our present
(sensations) to give us a sense of
continuity of experience.
3. It helps us in controlling and planning
for our future actions.
 Four Main Functions of Attention
1. Signal detection and vigilance – detecting
the appearance of a particular stimulus.
2. Search – finding a signal amidst distracter.
3. Selective attention – choosing to attend
some stimuli and ignore others.
4. Divided attention – prudently allocating
available attentional resources to coordinate
our performance of more than one task at a
time.
FUNCTION DESCRIPTION
SIGNAL On many occasions, we vigilantly try to
DETECTION detect whether we did or did not sense
AND VIGILANCE a signal. Through vigilant attention to
detecting signals, we are primed to
take speedy action when we do detect
signal stimuli.
SEARCH We often engage in an active search for - If we detect of smoke (result of
particular stimuli.
SELECTIVE We constantly are making choices
ATTENTION regarding the stimuli to which we will
pay attention and the stimuli that we
will ignore.
DIVIDED We often manage to engage in more
ATTENTION than one task at a time, and we shift
our attentional resources to allocate
them prudently, as needed.
EXAMPLE
-Unusual sonar blips (submarines)
-Unwelcome sights or sounds (dark
street)
-Wary of the smell of leaking gas or
of smoke (earthquake)
vigilance), we may engage in an
active search for the source of the
smoke.
- Missing keys, sunglasses, etc.
- Paying attention to a reading
textbook or to listening to a lecture
while ignoring such stimuli as a
nearby radio or television or
latecomers to the lecture.
- Driving vehicle (talking, swerving
vehicle toward their car)
 SIGNAL DETECTION: Finding Important
Stimuli in a Crowd
Signal Detection Theory(SDT) – is a framework to
explain how people pick out the few important
stimuli when they are embedded in a wealth of
irrelevant, distracting stimuli.
-It is often used to measure sensitivity to a target’s
presence.
-It can be discussed in the context of “attention,
perception, memory”.
-Possible outcomes in detecting a target stimulus
(true positives, false positives, false negatives, true
negatives)
 SIGNAL DETECT A SIGNAL DO NOT DETECT A
SIGNAL
Present Hit (true positives) Miss (false negatives)
- The screener - The screener fails to
recognizes a box cutter see the box cutter in the
in the luggage. luggage

Absent False alarm (false Correct rejection (true

positives) negatives)
- The screener thinks - The screener
there is a box cutter in recognizes that there is
the luggage when there no box cutter in the
is none. luggage, and there is
indeed none.
 VIGILANCE: Waiting to Detect a Signal

Vigilance refers to a person’s ability to attend

to a field of stimulation over a prolonged
period, during which the person seeks to
detect the appearance of a particular target
stimulus of interest.
- When being vigilant, the individual
watchfully waits to detect a signal stimulus
that may appear at unknown time.
 SEARCH: Actively Looking
Search refers to a scan of the environment for
particular features – actively looking for
something when you are not sure where it will
appear (i.e., picked up your parents or friends
at a crowded airport)
-Search is made more difficult by distracters,
nontarget stimuli that divert our attention away
from the target stimulus. (i.e., Grocery items)
Distracters cause more trouble under
some conditions under others (distinct
feature like color or shape)
Feature search simply scan the
environment for a specific feature of a
particular stimulus (featural singletons)
Conjunction search looks for a
particular combination (conjunction –
joining together) of features.
(Display Size) the display affects your ease of
performing the task.
(Feature Search)
Feature-Integration Theory
- Explains the relative ease of conducting
feature searches and the relative difficulty of
conducting conjunction searches.

Similarity Theory
-The data are result of the fact that as
similarity between target and distracter stimuli
increases.
-Targets are that are highly similar to
distracters are relatively hard to detect.
Similarity Theory
Similarity Theory
Guided Search Theory – suggests that all
searches, whether feature searches or
conjunction searches, involve two consecutive
stages.
(1)The parallel stage – the individual
simultaneously activates a mental
representation of all the potential targets.
(2)The serial stage – the individual
sequentially evaluates each of the activated
elements, according to the degree of
activation.
Guided Search Theory
SELECTIVE ATTENTION

(Dichotic presentation)
 Theories of Selective Attention
Broadbent’s Model – filtering of information right
after noticing at the sensory level.
Selective Filter Model – recognizing names in an
unattended ear (even when the participant ignore
most other high-level aspects of an unattended
message)
Attenuation Model (Treisman) – involves a later
filtering mechanism, instead of blocking stimuli out,
the filter merely weakens the strength of stimuli
other than the target stimulus.
Late-Filter Model – the location of the filter is
even later. The stimuli are filtered out only after
they have been analyzed both their physical
properties and their meaning.
-This later filtering would allow people to recognize
information entering the unattended ear.
DIVIDED ATTENTION
Allocation of Attentional Resources
Factors that influence our ability to pay attention
1. Anxiety – being anxious, either by nature or by
situation places constraints on attention.
2. Arousal – your overall state of arousal affects
attention as well.
3. Task difficulty – if you are working on a task that is
very difficult or novel for you, you’ll need more
attentional resources than when you work on an easy
or highly familiar task. Task difficulty particularly
influences performance during divided attention.
4. Skills – the more practiced and skilled you are in
performing a task, the more your attention is
enhanced.
 Neuroscience and Attention: A Network Model
Alerting is defined as being prepared to attend to
some incoming event, maintaining this attention. It
also includes the process of getting to this state of
preparedness.
Orienting is defined as the selection of stimuli to
attend to. This kind of attention is needed when we
perform a visual search.
Executive Attention includes processes for
monitoring and resolving conflicts that arise among
internal processes. These processes include
thoughts, feelings and responses.
 When Our Attention Fails Us
1. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
(ADHD) – the condition that makes it difficult
for a person to pay attention and control
impulsive behaviors.
Three main types of ADHD
2. Hyperactive – impulsive
3. Inattentive
4. A combination of hyperactive-impulsive and
inattentive behavior
Children with the inattentive type of ADHD show
several distinctive symptoms:
-They are easily distracted by irrelevant sights and
sounds.
-They often fail to pay attention to details.
-They are susceptible to making careless mistakes in
their work.
-They often fail to read instructions completely or
carefully.
-They tend to jump from one incomplete task to
another.
2. Change Blindness and Inattentional Blindness
Change blindness – an inability to detect changes
in objects or scenes that are being viewed.
Inattentional blindness – a person is not able to see
things that are actually there.

3. Spatial Neglect
- An inttentional dysfunction in which participants
ignore the half of their visual field that is
contralateral to the hemisphere of the brain that has
a lesion.
 HABITUATION AND ADAPTION
Habituation involves our becoming accustomed to a
stimulus so that we gradually pay less and less attention
to it.
Dishabituation is a change in a familiar stimulus
prompts us to start noticing the stimulus again.
Sensory adaptation is a lessening of attention to a
stimulus that is not subject to conscious control.
Arousal is a degree of physiological excitation,
responsivity, and readiness for action, relative to a
baseline. Arousal is often measured in terms of heart
rate, blood pressure, electroencephalograph patterns,
and other physiological signs.
 ADAPTATION
Not accessible to conscious control
Ex: You cannot decide how quickly to adopt
to a particular smell or a particular change
in light intensity
Tied closely to stimulus intensity
Ex: The more the intensity of a bright light
increases, the more strongly your senses
will adapt to the light.
Unrelated to the number, length, and
recency of prior exposures
Ex: The sense receptors in your skin will
respond to changes in temperature in
basically the same way no matter how
many times you have been exposed to such
changes and no matter how recently you
have experienced such changes.
HABITUATION
Accessible to conscious control
Ex: You can decide to become aware of
background conversations to which you
had become habituated
Not tied very closely to stimulus
intensity
Ex: Your level of habituation will not differ
much in your response to the sound of a
loud fan and to that of a quiet air
conditioner.
Tied very closely to the number,
length, ad recency of prior exposures
Ex: You will become more quickly
habituated to the sound of a chiming clock
when you have been exposed to the sound
more often, for longer times, and on more
recent occasions.
 Automatic and Controlled Processes in
Attention

Automatic Processes – doing an activity

involve no conscious control. They are
performed without conscious awareness.

Controlled Processes – accessible to

conscious control and even require it.
CHARACTERISTICS CONTROLLED AUTOMATIC
PROCESSES PROCESSES
Amount of intentional Require intentional effort Require little or no intention
efforts or effort

Degree of conscious Require full conscious Generally occur outside of

awareness awareness conscious awareness,
although some automatic
processes may be available
to consciousness

Use of attentional Consume many attentional Consume negligible

resources resources attentional resources

Type of processing Performed serially (one step Performed by parallel

at a time) processing (no particular
sequential order)
Speed of processing Relatively time-consuming Relatively fast
execution
Relative novelty of Novel and unpracticed tasks Familiar and highly practiced
tasks or tasks with many variable tasks, with largely stable task
features characteristics
Level of processing Relatively high levels of Relatively low levels of
cognitive processing cognitive processing (minimal
(requiring analysis or analysis or synthesis)
synthesis)
Difficulty of tasks Usually difficult tasks Usually relatively easy tasks,
but even relatively complex
tasks may be automatized,
given sufficient practice
Process of acquisition With sufficient practice, many routine and relatively stable
procedures may become automatized, such that highly
controlled processes may become partly or even wholly
automatic; the amount of practice required for
automatization increases dramatically for highly complex
tasks.
 Mistakes in Automatic Processes
Mistakes are errors in choosing an objective or
specifying a means of achieving it;.
Slips are errors in carrying out an intended means for
reaching an objective.
Type of Error
1. Capture errors
2. Ommissions
3. Perseverations
4. Description errors
5. Data-driven errors
6. Associative-activation errors
7. Loss of activation errors
 CONSCIOUSNESS

-The Consciousness of Mental Processes

-Preconscious Processing
-Studying the Preconscious-Priming
-The Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon
-When Blind People Can See