PSY107 – CHAPTER 4 (ATTENTION)

Cognitive Psychology, Sixth Edition- Robert J. Sternberg and Karin

Sternberg
THE NATURE OF ATTENTION AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Attention is how 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.
How Does Attention Work?
we perceive a lot of sensory information. Through attentional processes
(which can be automatic or controlled), we filter out the information that is
relevant to us and that we want to attend to. Which then leads to us act
based on the information we attended to.
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. helps in monitoring our interactions with the environment.
2. assists us in linking our past (memories) and our present
(sensations) to give us a sense of continuity of experience.
3. helps us in controlling and planning for our future actions.
Fou main functions of attention:
1. Signal detection and vigilance, detecting a particular target
stimulus of interest.
2. Search, active search for stimuli.
3. Selective attention, attend some stimuli and ignore others.
4. Divided attention, allocate our available attentional resources to
coordinate our performance of more than one task at a time.
Attending to signals over the short and long terms.
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.
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SDT often is used to measure sensitivity to a target’s presence. When we

try to detect a target stimulus (signal), there are four possible outcomes.
1. Hits: true positives (signal is present and it detects a signal)
2. False alarm: false positives (signal is absent but it detects a
signal)
3. Misses: false negatives (signal is present but does not detect a
signal)
4. Correct rejections: true negatives (signal is absent and does not
detect a signal)
Sensitivity is measured in terms of hits minus false alarms.
Signal-detection theory can be discussed in the context of attention,
perception, or memory:
• attention—paying enough attention to perceive objects that are
there.
• perception—perceiving faint signals that may or may not be
beyond your perceptual range.
• memory—indicating whether you have/have not been exposed to
a stimulus before.
What is Vigilance?
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.
In vigilance tasks, expectations regarding stimulus location strongly affect
response efficiency.
Neuroscience and Vigilance
amygdala plays a pivotal role in the recognition of emotional stimuli
which also appears to be an important brain structure in the regulation of
vigilance. Thalamus is involved in vigilance as well.
Two specific activation states play a role in vigilance:
1. bursts are the result of relative hyperpolarization of the resting
membrane potential.
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2. tonic state results from relative depolarization.

 search refers to a scan of the environment for features—actively
looking for something when you are not sure where it will appear.
 distracters are the nontarget stimuli that divert our attention away
from the target stimulus.
 display size is the number of items in each visual array.
 display-size effect is the degree to which the number of items in
a display hinders (slows down) the search process.
 feature search is when we simply scan the environment for that
feature.
 featural singletons are items with distinctive features, stand out
in the display.
 conjunction search is when we look for a particular combination
of features.
 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as well as both frontal eye fields
and the posterior parietal cortex play a role only in conjunction
searches, but not so in feature searches.
These theories have developed in a dialectical way as responses to each
other:
1. feature-integration theory,
2. similarity theory, and
3. guided search theory
Feature Integration Theory explains the relative ease of conducting
feature searches and the relative difficulty of conducting conjunction
searches.
similarity theory, the data are a result of the fact that as the similarity
between target and distracter stimuli increases, so does the difficulty in
detecting the target stimuli.
guided-search model, according to this model, the activation process of
the parallel initial stage helps to guide the evaluation and selection
process of the serial second stage of the search.
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What is selective Attention?

 cocktail party problem, the process of tracking one conversation
in the face of the distraction of other conversations.
 Shadowing is when you listen to two different messages.
 dichotic presentation, each ear is presented a separate
message.
Three factors help you to selectively attend only to the message of the
target speaker to whom you wish to listen:
1. Distinctive sensory characteristics of the target’s speech.
2. Sound intensity (loudness).
3. Location of the sound source.
Theories of Selective Attention
 Broadbent’s Model, we filter information right after we notice it at
the sensory level.
 Selective Filter Model suggested that the reason for this effect is
that messages that are of high importance to a person may break
through the filter of selective attention.
 Attenuation Model suggested that at least some information
about unattended signals is being analyzed.
 Late-Filter Model suggested that stimuli are filtered out only after
they have been analyzed for both their physical properties and
their meaning.
 Ulric Neisser synthesized the early-filter and the late-filter models
and proposed that there are two processes governing attention:
1. Preattentive processes: can be used to notice only
physical sensory characteristics of the unattended
message.
2. Attentive, controlled processes: serve to synthesize
fragments into a mental representation of an object.
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Treisman’s theory, discrete processes for feature detection and for

feature integration occur during searches.
dual-task paradigm, divided attention during the simultaneous
performance of two activities: reading short stories and writing down
dictated words.
The slowing resulting from simultaneous engagement in speeded tasks is
the PRP (psychological refractory period) effect, also called
attentional blink.
Theories of Divided Attention
Attentional resources may involve either:
1. single pool (the system has a single pool of resources that can
be divided up, say, among multiple tasks)
2. multiplicity of modality specific pools (a model that allows for
attentional resources to be specific to a given modality).
Factors That Influence Our Ability to Pay Attention
 Anxiety
 Arousal
 Task difficulty
 Skills
Three subfunctions of attention:
1. Alerting is being prepared to attend to some incoming event and
maintaining this attention and a dysfunction in this area can
develop ADHD.
2. Orienting is the selection of stimuli to attend to, a dysfunction in
this area can develop autism.
3. executive attention is a process for monitoring and resolving
conflicts that arise among internal processes, a dysfunction in this
area can develop Alzheimer's, BPD, and schizophrenia.
Intelligence and Attention
Luria’s theory of intelligence assumes that intelligence consists of an
assortment of functional units that are the basis for specific actions.
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According to the PASS (Planning, Attention, and Simultaneous–

Successive Process) model, there are three distinct processing units, and
each is associated with specific areas of the brain:
1. arousal and attention; arousal is an essential antecedent to
selective and divided attention.
2. simultaneous and successive processing
3. planning
Inspection time is the amount of time it takes you to inspect items and
decide about them.
Reaction time is the time it takes to select one answer from among
several possibilities.
WHEN OUR ATTENTION FAILS US
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are difficulties in
focusing attention on ways that enable them to adapt in optimal ways to
their environment.
There are three main types of ADHD, depending on which symptoms are
predominant:
1. hyperactive-impulsive
2. inattentive
3. a combination of hyperactive-impulsive and inattentive
behavior

 Change blindness, an inability to detect changes in objects or

scenes that are being viewed.
 Inattentional blindness, which is a phenomenon in which people are
not able to see things that are there.
 Spatial neglect or hemi-neglect is an attentional dysfunction in
which participants ignore the half of their visual field that is
contralateral to the hemisphere of the brain that has a lesion. This
phenomenon is called “extinction.”
 Habituation involves our becoming accustomed to a stimulus so that
we gradually pay less and less attention to it.
 Dishabituation, a change in a familiar stimulus prompts us to start
noticing the stimulus again.
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 Sensory adaptation is a lessening of attention to a stimulus that is

not subject to conscious control.
Controlled vs. Automatic Processing
 Automatic processing requires no conscious control and are
tasks that start off as controlled processes eventually become
automatic ones because of practice.
 Controlled processing requires conscious control and occur
sequentially, one step at a time.
Automatization: Two Explanations
1. Integrated components theory: Anderson its practice leads to
integration; less and less attention is needed.
2. Instance theory: Logan were retrieved from memory specific
answers, skipping the procedure; thus, less attention is needed.
Stroop effect of John Ridley Stroop is a demonstration that
automatization in reading can work against us.
Conscious Processing are the information that is available for cognitive
processing but that currently lies outside conscious awareness such as:
1. Priming is study of things that currently lie outside conscious
awareness.
2. TOT (tip-of-tongue) phenomenon is when you know, you know
the word, but you cannot fully retrieve the word.
3. Blindsight