IBP: Introduction to cognitive psychology

Chapter 3:  Attention

Attention:  systems involved in the selection and prioritization of information processing, and it is intimately linked with perception and memory

What is attention for?

• Selection for perception: detecting and selecting what to process from a visual display
• Selection for action: detecting and selecting which response or action to make

Capture: The ability of one source of information to take processing priority from another

• For example: the sudden onset of novel information within a modality such as an apple falling may interrupt ongoing attentional processing

Binding problem: The problem of how different properties of an item are correctly put together, or bound, into the correct combination

• For example, if there is a red colour in the shape of a circle on the left, and a green colour in the shape of a square on the right, the colour, shape and position of each property must be correctly bound together

Controlled attention: Attention processing that is under conscious, intentional control. It requires attentional resources, or capacity, and is subject to interference

• Is said to operate top-down because it is influenced by a goal we have set ourselves such as searching for something in particular
• The source of control is endogenous, it comes from within us

Exogenous attention: Attention that is drawn automatically to a stimulus without the intention of the participant.

Stroop effect: The effect of a well-learned response to a stimulus slowing the ability to make the less well-learned response; for example, naming the ink colour of a colour word

Slips of action: Errors in carrying out sequences of actions, e.g. where a step in the sequence is omitted, or an appropriate action is made, but to the wrong object

Where is the limit?

• When two stimuli are presented in rapid succession and the participant must make a fast response to both, response time (RT) to the second stimulus depends upon the time interval between the presentation of the two stimuli
• The psychological refractory period (PRP): The delay in responding to the second stimulus
• Bottleneck: The point in processing where parallel processing becomes serial
  • processing of the second stimulus must wait until processing of the first stimulus is completed
• Shadowing: Used in a dichotic listening task in which participants must repeat aloud the to-be-attended message and ignore the other message
• Early selection: Selective attention that operates on the physical information available from early perceptual analysis

Breakthrough: The ability of information to capture conscious awareness despite being unattended

• Usually used with respect to the unattended channel in dichotic listening experiments
• Late selection: An account of selective processing where attention operates after all stimuli have been analysed for their semantic properties

Subliminal priming effects:

• Galvanic skin response: A measurable change in the electrical conductivity of the skin when emotionally significant stimuli are presented. Often used to detect the unconscious processing of stimuli.
• Subliminal: Below the threshold for conscious awareness or confident report
• Masking: The disruptive effect of an auditory or visual pattern that is presented immediately after an auditory or visual stimulus. This is backward masking, but there are other types of masking

Negative priming: the finding that the response time to categorise a target item will be slowed if that same item has been presented on the previous trial as a distractor item which was to be ignored

Directing the spotlight of visual attention:

• When we search the visual environment, we can make an eye movement, or saccade, to direct the focus of visual attention to a location
  • This movement is overt (plainly apparent)
  • Usually where we are attending coincides with where we are looking, because when we fixate on an item the fovea is directed to the area of interest
• We may also attend to something ‘out of the corner of our eye’, without making an eye movement
  • In this case you are intentionally directing, or orienting, your attention in an endogenous way, using top-down control. This type of orientation of attention is covert (hidden)
• Gaze-mediated orienting: An exogenous shift of attention following the direction of gaze of a face presented at fixation

Cross-modal cueing of attention:

• Modality: The processing system specific to one of the senses, such as vision, hearing or touch
• Experiments on attention have investigated cross-modal effects on orienting spatial attention, for example between seeing and hearing
• Selective filtering: An attentional task that requires selection of one source of information for further processing and report in a difficult task such as dichotic listening or visual search for a conjunction of properties
• Selective set: An attentional task requiring detection of a target from a small set of possibilities.

Visual search:

• Conjunction: a term from feature integration theory of attention that describes a target defined by at least two separable features, such as a red O amongst green O’s and red T’s
• When a target is defned by just one distinctive feature, that feature is available on its feature map and calls attention to itself, resulting in pop-out
  • Pop-out: an object will pop out from a display if it is detected in parallel and is different from all other items in the display

Attention and cognitive control:

• A routine behaviour requires little monitoring but the price paid for this low level of control is that we sometimes make a slip of action (e.g.: putting shaving cream on tooth brush)

• Schema activation takes place unconsciously and is controlled by an automatic system, called the contention scheduler that allows automatic actions to run smoothly
• Frontal lobe syndrome: The pattern of deficits exhibited by patients with damage to the frontal lobes. These patients are distractible, have difficulty setting, maintaining and changing behavioural goals, and are poor at planning sequences of actions

Combining tasks:

• Sometimes we have to stop doing one task because it is impossible to do them both without making a mistake
• Attentional blink (AB): the phenomenon that the second of two targets cannot be detected when it appears close in time to the first.

Experiment comparing consistent and varied mapping:

• In the consistent mapping condition, targets were always consonants and distractors were always digits. Results showed that with consistent mapping, search time was virtually independent of both the number of items in the memory set and the number of items in the display, as if search is taking place in parallel – refecting ‘automatic processing’
• In the varied mapping condition,both the memory set and distractors were a mixture of letters and digits. In the varied mapping condition, participants were slower to detect targets and RTs increased with the number of distractors in the display – refecting attention demanding ‘controlled processing’

Production system: A computational model based on numerous IF–THEN condition–action rules. IF the rule is represented in working memory THEN the production stored in long-term memory is applied

Procedural knowledge: Unconscious knowledge about how to do something

Resources:

An Introduction to Cognitive Psychology: Processes and Disorders 3rd edition (Groome, David)