Attention

Chapter 4
 What Is Attention?

 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

 ability to focus on a task

 ability to concentrate
 Attention Is…

• The concentration of mental energy that must be

used to process incoming information
– Selective
– Limited
– Both conscious and preconscious
CONT
 World made of = many sensations
and stimulus's = to cope with the
flood of information = the human
observer = selects some cues
and tune out the rest.
 Attend to some cues more than
others.
 Attended cues = passed for
processing.
 5 issues
 1. Processing capacity, selectiveness = attend
to some cues but not all.
 2. Control = We have some control over the
stimuli we attend to.
 3. Automatic processing = routine requires little
conscious attention / automatic = driving.
 4. Consciousness = Attention bring events to
consciousness.
 5. Brain n CNS support attention and
cognition.
 Preconscious Processing

• Information that is available for cognitive

processing but that currently lies outside of
conscious awareness exists at the preconscious
level of awareness
 Priming

– Processing of certain stimuli is facilitated by prior

presentation of the same or similar stimuli
– Sometimes we are aware of the prime sometimes we
are not
– Even when we are not aware of the prime, the prime
will influence the processing of the target
 Antony Marcel (1983)

• Participants had to classify series of words into

various categories (e.g. pine-plant)

• Primes where words with two meanings such as

palm followed by target word (tree or hand)

• Task outline:
Is this a plant?
Prime – PALM
Target - TREE
 cont

- If the participant was consciously aware of

seeing the word “palm”, the mental pathway for
only one meaning was activated.

- If the word “palm” was presented so briefly that

the person was unaware of seeing the word,
both meanings of the word appeared to be
activated
 cont

• Facilitative Priming
– Target stimuli (e.g., BUTTER) are processed faster if
preceded by a related word (e.g., BREAD)
• Negative Priming Effect
– Target stimuli (e.g., PINE) is processed slower if
preceded by a word related to target’s alternate
meaning (PALM relating to hand)
 Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon

• We try to remember something that is known to

be stored in memory but that cannot quite be
retrieved.

• People who can not come up with the word, but

who thought they knew it, could identify the first
letter, indicate the number of syllables, or
approximate the word’s sounds
 Blindsight

• Lesions in some areas of the visual cortex

• Patients claim to be blind
• When forced to guess about a stimulus in the
“blind” region, they correctly guess locations
and orientations of objects at above-chance
levels
 Controlled Versus Automatic
Processes
• Controlled processes
– Require intentional effort; full conscious awareness;
consume many attentional resources; performed
serially; relatively slow
• Automatic Processes
– Little or no intention or effort; occur outside of
conscious awareness; do not require a lot of attention,
performed by parallel processing; fast
cont
• Many tasks that start off as controlled
processes eventually become automatic
ones

• Automatization
– The process by which a procedure changes
from being highly conscious to being relatively
automatic
• Rate of learning slows as amount of
learning increases
• Practice increases automatization and
preconscious attention
 Habituation

• Decrease in
responsiveness
when exposed to a
repeated stimulus
– People who smoke
do not notice the
smell of cigarettes on
their clothes, but
nonsmokers do
– People get used to
hearing the chiming
of their clocks
 Dishabituation

• Change in familiar stimuli causes one

to notice it again
– Smokers who quit, suddenly notice how much their
clothes smell of smoke
– If clock breaks, suddenly owner notices the clock isn’t
chiming

• Sensory adaptation
– Physiological phenomenon; not subject to conscious
control; occurs directly in the sense organ, not in the
brain
 Attention

• We vigilantly try to detect whether we did or did

not sense a signal (a particular target stimulus of
interest)

• Vigilance
– 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
 Search

• Search
– Scan the environment for particular features
– Whereas vigilance involves passively waiting for a signal
stimulus to appear, search involves actively seeking out
the target

• Distracters
– Nontarget stimuli that divert our attention away from the
target stimuli
– Can cause false alarm
2 kinds of search:
• Feature search
– When we can look for some distinctive features
of a target we simply scan the environment for
those features.

• Conjunction search
– We look for a particular combination of features
• Feature
search –
parallel, set
size largely
irrelevant.

• Conjunction
search –
serial, set
size
matters.
 Feature-Integration Theory (Anne
Treisman)
– Each of us has mental map for representing the
given set of features for a particular item (shape,
size, color features)

– During feature searches we monitor the relevant

feature map for the presence of any activation in
the visual field

– During conjunction searches, we can simply use

the map of features, we must conjoin two or more
features into an object representation at a
particular location
 Similarity Theory

• Similarity between targets and distracters is

important; not number of features to be combined

– The more shared features among items in display, the

more difficult to detect a particular target
 Selective Attention

 Constant bombarded by stimuli

- Limited capacity

 Selective attention refers to the selective

processing of task relevant information and
the successfully ignoring irrelevant info.
 Theories of Selective Attention

 Selective attention theories suggest that we

have a tendency to orient ourselves toward
only one part of the environment with the
exclusion of other parts.
 selective attention is governed by
arousal level.
 The most persistent question has been
whether the shifts in attention that
accompany changes in the arousal level
are automatic, or deliberate.
 Selective Attention

 it's clear that we do filter out a great number of

stimuli, it's not at all clear how we do it, nor
what information we note unconsciously.
 In an attempt to find out psychologists
have frequently used dichotic listening
experiments (i.e. two different messages
presented separately to each ear),
roughly along the lines of the situation at
a party.
 Find the Blue Letter

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

T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
 Read the bold print
• Somewhere Among hidden the in most the
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an ability old to miner select hid one a
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Although do several this hundred by
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 What do you remember
from the regular print text?
What does this tell you
about selective attention?
 Broadbent

 Broadbent (1957) developed the filter model to

explain the proposition that a bottleneck occurs
before pattern recognition, and that attention
determines what information reaches the pattern
recognition stage.
 This model asserts that the selective filter allows
information to come in from only one channel at a
time, into working memory.
 Broadbent's Model
 Properties:
1.Early selection
2.Selection (filtering) is based on
physical properties of the stimulus (e.g.,
pitch, loudness..)
3.Attention directed to info that passes
the filter or to physically salient info that
leads to shift in attention.
4.Only one input channel processed at a
time.
5.It takes time to shift attention.
 Sensory Sensory Working
Stores Filter Memory

• Only one sensory channel is Long

allowed Term
to proceed Memory
• Stimuli filtered at sensory level
 dichotic listening task
 used to illustrate Broadbent's filter model.
• Dichotic presentation
– Listening to two different messages (presenting a
different message to each ear) and attending to only
one of them
 participant puts on set of headphones, requested to
listen to only one ear, and report that info.

 The information presented to the participant is different

between the two ears, and therefore fits the filter model
perfectly.
 Participants lack awareness of the unattended ear's
content, or even languange.
Dichotic Listening Task
 Shadowing task

• Shadowing
– Listening to two different messages and
repeating back only one of the
messages as soon as possible after you
hear it
 Shadowing a message provides proof
that the participant is following
instructions, and is attending to the
correct ear. During a shadowing task,
subjects are completely unaware of the
unattended ear's message.
 Problems with the model

 cocktail party" phenomenon

• The cocktail party problem (Cherry, 1953)

– The process of tracking one conversation
in the face of the distraction of other
conversations

 The questioning of Broadbent's selection

filter's location arises, since the participant
is able to follow the switch between ears in
continuing a message.
Cocktail Party Effect
 Bottleneck Theories

 All information gets into sensory register

 Somewhere along the way, information is
filtered or selected for attention
 Only selected information makes it into
awareness and long-term memory
bottleneck” in filter theory
 cont

 bottleneck is a mechanism that

limits the amount of information
to be attended to
 what gets through, what is
selected and when.
 Attenuation Model (Treisman)

 Treisman proposed a model

which consists of two
components, each relying
on the other to function
properly, named the
attenuation model.
 In Treisman's attenuation model, the
selective filter distinguishes between two
messages on the basis of their physical
characteristics, such as location, intensity
and pitch. The ‘dictionary' in Treisman's
model allows for selection between
messages on the basis of content.
 Certain information requires a very low
threshold inactivating awareness of a
stimulus.
 Treisman – Dictionary

 People’s store of words.

 Some words have a lower threshold
of activation = words, sounds of
own name, cry of a child = more
easily activated than
 Less important signals
 Treisman’s Attenuation Model

1. We preattentively analyze the physical properties

of a stimulus (stimuli with target properties)

2. We analyze whether a given stimulus has a

pattern, such as speech or music

3. We sequentially evaluate the incoming

messages, assigning appropriate meanings to the
selected stimuli messages
 Treisman's Attenuation Model

 Properties:
1.Early selection
2.Selection (attenuation) is based on
physical properties of the stimulus
(e.g., pitch, loudness, etc...).
3.Attention is directed toward
information that reaches a threshold
of recognition.
4.Several inputs can be processed at a
time.
• Attenuation of Unattended

Sensory Working
Stores Memory

Filter weakens the strength of unattended information.

Arrow colors represent different levels of strength Long
Term
If arrow reaches circle, info will be activated in working Memory
memory

Note some circles are closer due to different thresholds of

information
 Deutsch & Deutsch (1963)

• Deutsch and Deutsch’s Late Filter Model

– Placed the signal-blocking filter later in the
process, after sensory analysis and also after
some perceptual and conceptual analysis of
input had taken place

 Later models Deutsch and Deutsch

(1963),Norman (1968). These more recent
models claimed that selection occurs after the
pattern recognition stage. In these models
attention is equivalent to the selection stage.
 Early Selection vs. Attenuation vs. Late Selection

• Broadbent proposed that physical characteristics

of messages are used to select one message for
further processing and all others are lost.

• Treisman proposed that physical characteristics

are used to select one message for full
processing and other messages are given partial
processing.

• Deutsch & Deutsch (1963) proposed that all

messages get through, but that only one
response can be made (late selection)
Early Filtering (Broadbent):
Filter

Input Detection Recognition

Attenuation (Treisman):
Attenuator

Input Detection Recognition

Late Filtering (Deutsch & Deutsch):

Filter

Input Detection Recognition

 Automatic vs. Controlled
Neisser’s Synthesis
Two processes governing attention
Preattentive processes (rapid, automatic,
parallel)
Attentive processes (controlled, occur
later, serial)

 Automatic Processes  Controlled Processes

 Fast and efficient
 Unavailable to  Slow and less efficient
consciousness  Available to consciousness
 Unavoidable  Controllable
 Unintentional
 Intentional
 Stroop effect (Stroop, 1935)

– Demonstrates the psychological difficulty in

selectively attending to the color of the ink and
trying to ignore the word that is printed with the
ink of that color

– Since reading is an automatic process (not

readily subject to your conscious control) you
find it difficult intentionally to refrain from reading
and instead to concentrate on identifying the
color of the ink
Read through this list of color names as quickly as
possible. Read from right to left across each line

Red Yellow Blue Green

Blue Red Green Yellow
Yellow Green Red Blue
 cont

Name as quickly as possible the color of ink in

which each word is printed. Name from left to
right across each line.

Red Blue Green Yellow

Yellow Red Blue Green
Blue Yellow Green Red
 Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention

 Attn tied to specific cortical region

 Separate system of the brain that
deal with attention
 Interaction with other parts but
maintains identity
 Visual
Neglect
Reading
Writing