Pay Attention!

Outline
 What is Attention?
 Orienting
 Cueing Attention
 Visual Search
 Selective Attention
 Dichotic Listening Tasks
 Bottleneck Theories
 Divided Attention
 Capacity Model
 Automatic vs. Controlled Processing
 Visual Neglect
 What Is Attention?
 Definition
 Attention is the process by which the mind
chooses from among the various stimuli that
strike the senses at any given moment
• allows only some info to enter into consciousness
 Related Concepts:
 Alertness
 Concentration
 Selectivity
 Control
Big Issues in Attention
 Facts that drive attention
research
 We are bombarded by more
information than we can attend to
• Selective Attention
• Divided Attention
• Automaticity
 Some tasks can be performed
with little, if any, attention
Orienting
 We don’t passively see or hear
 We actively look and listen
 Different ways to orient to a stimulus
 Overt Orienting
 Covert Orienting
 Attentional Gaze
 Attention can be drawn to a particular
location independent of where our
eyes are looking or our ears are
oriented
 Cuing Attention

 Give people a cue where a

target will appear in the
visual field
 Manipulate the kind of cue
 Valid Cue
 Neutral Cue
 Invalid Cue
 How does cue affect
performance?
Results

 Different kinds of
cues are possible
 Voluntary Orienting
• Endogenous Cue
• Arrow
 Automatic Orienting
• Exogenous Cue
• Flashing light
Find the T

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Find the T

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R R RR R R
R T RR R R
Find the Blue Letter

L L
L L
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 Find the Blue Letter

L L L L
L LL LL L
L L
L L LL L L LL
L L L L L L
L L
L L L L L
L
Find the vertical T

T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
Find the vertical T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T

T
T
T

T
Find the vertical T

R T
R R
RR
Find the vertical T

R R

T
T

T
R R T R
T

R R RR
T

T
Find the Blue L

T
T L
T
T L T
L
L L
 Find the Blue L

L T L T L T
L L L L
L T L T TLT L T T
L T
T L T LL L L TLL
T
L L L LL L T L T
L T T L
L L L L LT
L T T
 What’s Going On?

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Conjunction
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Feature
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Number of Items
All Searches Are NOT Equal
A Is More Difficult Than B

A B
 Why Is This Important?

Watch the Dial Watch for Light

Is There Trouble?
Dichotic Listening Task
 Shadowing Results

 Physical attributes of unattended channel

are detected
 Male vs. female voice
 Human vs. musical instruments

 Semantic attributes of unattended

channel were missed
 Don’t notice foreign language
 Don’t notice repeated items
Filter Theory (Broadbent)
Cocktail Party Effect
 Attenuation Model (Treisman)
 Present a story in dichotic listening task
 Story switches from attended ear to
unattended ear
 Participant mistakenly shadows from attended
ear to unattended ear

Attended Ear: Unattended Ear:

She had peanut butter freaking laser beams
you keep using that word and jelly sandwiches
 Problems with Early Models
 Memory for unattended channel may depend on
familiarity or importance
 Cocktail party effect
 There are effects of practice
 There is implicit memory for the unattended
channel even when there isn’t explicit memory
 Shock study
 People can shadow meaningful message that
switch from ear to ear
 Treisman
 Memory for unattended channel affected by
similarity to attended channel
 Context Effects

 Attended ear:
 “They were standing near the bank”
 Unattended ear:
 One of the following was presented
• “river”
• “money”
 Participants interpreted “bank” as
 a riverbank if they heard “river”
 a financial bank if they heard “money”
Late Selection
(Deutsch & Deutsch)
 Problems with Late Models
 Even if pertinence is controlled for
 We are more likely to notice effects in the
attended channel (87%)
 We are less likely to notice effects in the
unattended channel (8%)
 If selection is late
 Why do we feel like we’re consciously
selecting early?
 Neuro evidence
 Enhanced neural processing at early stages
Early Filtering (Broadbent):
Filter

Input Detection Recognition

Attenuation (Treisman):
Attenuator

Input Detection Recognition

Late Filtering (Deutsch & Deutsch):

Filter

Input Detection Recognition

 Bottleneck Theories

 All information gets into sensory register

 Somewhere along the way, information is
filtered or selected for attention
 Early
• at perceptual level
 Late
• at response level
 Only selected information makes it into
awareness and long-term memory
Divided Attention
 Dual task experiments
 Get people to perform
multiple tasks and look at
the effects on performance
 Often find that
performance suffers
• This breakdown of
performance when two tasks
are combined sheds light on
the limitations and nature of
the human information-
processing system
 Dual Task Performance
 Divided attention is difficult when:
 Tasks are similar
 Tasks are difficult
 When both tasks require conscious attention
 Divided attention is easier when:
 Tasks are dissimilar
 Tasks are simple
 When at least one of the tasks does not
require conscious attention
 Tasks are practiced
 Capacity Theories

 Tasks take mental effort

 We have limited mental
effort to allocate to all
demands on our attention
 Conscious control of
allocation
 Some tasks require more
attention than others
Resource Allocation Model (Kahneman)

 What Affects Allocation?

 Resources
• Arousal
• Available Capacity
 Other Effects
• Enduring Dispositions
• Momentary Intentions
 Different Processes

 Some tasks are easier to perform than

others and don’t seem to affect attention
 Especially tasks that are well practiced
 Other tasks are tedious and require our
conscious attention
 Two types of processing:
 Automatic or pre-attentive processing
 Controlled or attentive processing
An Applied Example
 Neely (1977)
 Priming study, using a lexical decision task
 4 primes
 BIRD, BODY, BUILDING, XXX
 Manipulated expectancies of the target
 BIRD - types of birds
 BODY - building parts
 BUILDING - body parts
 XXX - bird, body parts, and building parts equally
often
 Short (e.g., 250ms) and long (e.g., 2,000ms) SOAs
 Neely (1977) Results
 BIRD (expect types of birds)
 BIRD - robin
• facilitation for bird targets at short and long SOAs
 BODY (expect building parts)
 BODY - door
• facilitation for building targets at long SOAs, but
not at short SOAs
 BODY - heart
• inhibition for body targets at long SOAs, but
facilitation at short SOAs
 Automatic vs. Controlled

 Automatic Processes
 Fast and efficient
 Unavailable to
consciousness
 Unavoidable
 Unintentional
 Controlled Processes
 Slow and less efficient
 Available to
consciousness
 Controllable
 Intentional
 When Attention Is Lost

Visual Neglect
Their Visual Experience

Writing

Reading
Bisect All the Lines…
Drawings