Attention

What is Attention?

The ability to focus on specific stimuli

or locations.
 Selective Attention

 In his book «Principles of Psychology», William James’

wrote the following statement.

 «Millions of items…are present to my senses which

never properly enter my experience. Why? Because
they have no interest for me. My experience is what I
agree to attend to. . . It implies withdrawal from some
things in order to deal effectively with others.»
 Selective Attention
 Thus, according to James, we focus on some things to
the exclusion of others.

 As you walk down the street, the things that you pay
attention to stand out more than many other things in
the environment.

 According to this idea, selective attention not only

highlights whatever is being attended, but also keeps
us from perceiving whatever isn’t being attended
 SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING
 Many of the early experiments involved the idea of a “filter” that
acted on incoming information, keeping some information out
and letting some information in for further processing.
 The following demonstration illustrates how auditory stimuli
were used in one of the early selective attention experiments.
 Your task in this demonstration is to focuse on one message
called dichotic listening.
 SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING
In a dichotic listening experiment,
different messages are presented to
the two ears.

In a selective attention experiment,

participants are instructed to pay
attention to the message presented
to one ear (the attended message),
repeating it out loud as they are
hearing it, and to ignore the message
presented to the other ear (the
unattended message).
SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING
 As Cherry’s participants shadowed the attended
message, the other message was stimulating auditory
receptors within the unattended ear.
 However, when asked what they had heard in the
unattended ear, participants could say only that they
could tell there was a message and could identify it as a
male or female voice.
 They could not report the content of the message.
SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING

 Cherry showed that a listener can attend to just one message, and Donald
Broadbent (1958) created a model of attention to explain how this
selective attention is achieved.

 This early selection model proposed that information passes through the
following stages shown in figure 4.3
 SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING
 Sensory memory holds all of the incoming information for a fraction of a
second and then transfers all of it to the next stage.

 The filter identifies the attended message based on its physical

characteristics and lets only this message pass through to the detector in
the next stage. All other messages are filtered out.
 SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING
 The detector processes information to determine higher-level
characteristics of the message, such as its meaning.

 Short-term memory receives the output of the detector. Short-term

memory holds information for 10–15 seconds and transfers information
into long-term memory, which can hold information indefinitely.
 SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING
 Broadbent’s model provided testable predictions about selective
attention, some of which turned out not to be correct.
 For example, according to Broadbent’s model, information in the
unattended message should not be accessible to consciousness.
 However, Moray (1959) did an experiment similar to Broadbent’s model.
 But when Moray presented the listener’s name to the other, unattended
ear, about a third of the participants detected it.
 You may have had similar experience as you were talking to someone in
a noisy room, you suddenly heard someone else saying your name.
 SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING
 Following Moray’s lead, other
experimenters showed that
information presented to the
unattended ear is processed enough
to provide the listener with some
awareness of its meaning.
 This occurred because they were
taking the meaning of the words into
account.
SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING

 Because of results such as these, Treisman (1964) proposed a

modification of Broadbent’s theory.
 Treisman proposed that selection occurs in two stages, so she
replaced Broadbent’s filter with an attenuator.
 SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING

 The attenuator analyzes the incoming message in terms of (1) its physical
characteristics—whether it is high pitched or low-pitched, fast or slow; (2) its
language—how the message groups into syllables or words; and (3) its
meaning—how sequences of words create meaningful phrases.

 In Treisman’s attenuation theory of attention, language and meaning can

also be used to separate the messages.
 SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING
 To him, words that are common or especially
important, such as the listener’s name, have low
thresholds, even a weak signal in the unattended
channel can activate that word, and we hear our
name from across the room.
 Uncommon words or words that are unimportant
to the listener have higher thresholds, so it takes
the strong signal of the attended message to
activate these words.
 Thus, according to Treisman, the attended
message gets through, plus some parts of the
weaker unattended message.
 SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING
 Messages can be selected at a later stage of processing, on their meaning.

 Participants in an experiment by MacKay (1973) listened to ambiguous

sentences, such as “They were throwing stones at the bank,” that could be
taken more than one way. (In this example, “bank” can refer to a riverbank or
to a financial institution)
 These ambiguous sentences were presented to the attended ear, while
biasing words were presented to the other, unattended ear.

 For example, as the participants were shadowing “They were throwing

stones at the bank,” either the word “river” or the word “money” was being
presented to the unattended ear.
 SELECTIVE ATTENTION AS FILTERING
 Participants were presented with pairs of sentences such as the following:

• They threw stones toward the side of the river yesterday.

• They threw stones at the savings and loan association yesterday.

 Because the meaning of the unattended word (“money”) was affecting the
participant’s judgment, this word must have been processed to the level of
meaning.

 Results such as this led McKay and other theorists to propose late selection
models of attention, which proposed that most of the incoming information
is processed to the level of meaning before the message to be processed is
selected.
 COGNITIVE RESOURCES, COGNITIVE LOAD,
AND TASK-IRRELEVANT STIMULI

 Cognitive resources refers to the idea that a person has a certain

cognitive capacity, which can be used for various tasks.
 Cognitive load is the amount of a person’s cognitive resources
needed to carry out a particular cognitive task.
 Some tasks, especially easy, well-practiced ones, have low cognitive
loads; these low-load tasks use up only a small amount of the
person’s cognitive resources.
 Other tasks, those that are difficult and perhaps not as well practiced,
are high-load tasks and use more cognitive resources.
 COGNITIVE RESOURCES, COGNITIVE LOAD,
AND TASK-IRRELEVANT STIMULI

 For example, a person is sitting in her dorm room

listening to music, which uses only a portion of
her cognitive resources, so the voices of people
talking in the hall intrude even though the person
would rather not hear them.
 Such a situation might occur when a person is
sitting in his dorm room concentrating intensely
on a particularly difficult homework problem.
 The person is concentrating so hard that he is
devoting all of his cognitive resources to the task,
so he is only vaguely aware of the people talking
in the hall.
COGNITIVE RESOURCES, COGNITIVE LOAD,
AND TASK-IRRELEVANT STIMULI
COGNITIVE RESOURCES, COGNITIVE LOAD,
AND TASK-IRRELEVANT STIMULI
 COGNITIVE RESOURCES, COGNITIVE LOAD,
AND TASK-IRRELEVANT STIMULI
The Stroop Effect
 If you found it harder to name the colors of the words than the
colors of the shapes, then you were experiencing the Stroop effect.
 This effect occurs because the names of the words cause a
competing response and therefore slow responding to the
target—the color of the ink.
 In the Stroop effect the task irrelevant stimuli are extremely
powerful, because reading words is highly practiced and has
become so automatic that it is difficult not to read them.
 Divided Attention

 Our emphasis so far has been on attention as a mechanism for

focusing on one task.
 But what if you want to purposely distribute your attention
among a few tasks?
 For example, Crystal is able to look at the umbrella while
simultaneously being sure she doesn’t step on any rocks.
 Also, people can simultaneously drive, have conversations,
listen to music, and think about what they’re going to be doing
later that day.
 DIVIDED ATTENTION CAN BE ACHIEVED WITH
PRACTICE: AUTOMATIC PROCESSING

 Experiments by Schneider and

Shiffrin involve divided attention
because they require the participant
to carry out two tasks simultaneously:

 (1) Holding information about target

stimuli in memory and

 (2) Paying attention to a series of

“distractor” stimuli and determining if
one of the target stimuli is present
among these distractor stimuli.
 DIVIDED ATTENTION CAN BE ACHIEVED WITH
PRACTICE: AUTOMATIC PROCESSING

 At the beginning of the experiment, the participants’

performance was only 55 percent correct, and it took 900 trials
for performance to reach 90 percent.
 Participants reported that for the first 600 trials, they had to
keep repeating the target items in each memory set to
remember them.
 However, participants reported that after about 600 trials, the
task had become automatic: The frames appeared and
participants responded without consciously thinking about it.
 DIVIDED ATTENTION CAN BE ACHIEVED WITH
PRACTICE: AUTOMATIC PROCESSING

 According to Schneider and Shiffrin the practice made it

possible for participants to divide their attention to deal with
all of the target and test items simultaneously.
 Furthermore, the many trials of practice resulted in automatic
processing, a type of processing that occurs
 (1) Without intention (it happens automatically without the
person intending to do it) and,
 (2) At a cost of only some of a person’s cognitive resources.
 DIVIDED ATTENTION CAN BE ACHIEVED WITH
PRACTICE: AUTOMATIC PROCESSING

 Real-life experiences are filled with examples of automatic

processing because there are many things that we have been
practicing for years.
 For example, have you ever wondered, after leaving home, whether
you had locked the door, and then returned to find that you had?
Locking the door has become such an automatic response that they
do it without paying attention.
 Another example of automatic processing occurs when you have
driven somewhere and can’t remember the trip once you get to your
destination.
 DIVIDED ATTENTION WHEN TASKS
ARE HARDER: CONTROLLED PROCESSING

 However, when the targets and stimuli are the same i.e. either letters or
numbers, it was difficult for participants to automatic processing.

 Schneider and Shiffrin describe the processing as controlled processing,

because the participants had to pay close attention at all times and had to
search for the target among the distractors in a much more focused and
controlled way.

 For example, you may find it easy to drive and talk at the same time if
traffic is light on a familiar road. But as traffic increases, you see a flashing
“Construction Ahead” sign, and the road suddenly becomes rutted, you
might have to stop your conversation to devote all of your cognitive
resources to driving.
 DISTRACTIONS WHILE DRIVING

 Research demonstrated a connection between cell phone use

and traffic accidents.
 A survey of accidents and cell phone use in Toronto showed
that the risk of a collision was four times higher when using a
cell phone than when a cell phone was not being used.
 Perhaps the most significant result of the Toronto study is that
hands-free cell phone units offered no safety advantage.
 DISTRACTIONS WHILE DRIVING

 In a laboratory experiment on the

effects of cell phones, Strayer and
Johnston placed participants in a
driving task that required them to apply
the brakes as quickly as possible in
response to a red light.
 Doing this task while talking on a cell
phone caused participants to miss
twice as many of the red lights as when
they weren’t talking on the phone even
with “hands-free” cell phone device.
 ATTENTION AND VISUAL PERCEPTION

 It is clear that attention is an important

component of many of the tasks we carry out
routinely every day.

 Attention is so important that, without it, we

may fail to perceive things that are clearly
visible in our field of view.
 INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS

 One way to demonstrate the

importance of attention for perception
is to create a situation in which a
person’s attention is focused on one
task and then determine whether the
person perceived nearby stimulus.

 When observers were then given a

recognition test in which they are
asked to pick the object that had been
presented, they were unable to do so.
 INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0grANlx7y2E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qghh2Zsh3CY

Nearly half—46 percent—of the observers failed to

report having seen the event, even though it was
clearly visible.
 CHANGE DETECTION

 This difficulty in detecting changes in scenes is called

change blindness.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ScpVf9KNYU

 These experiments demonstrate that when observers

are attending to one sequence of events, they can fail
to notice another event, even when it is right in front
of them.
 Overt Attention: Attending by Moving
Our Eyes
 The shifts of attention that occur in overt attention are
accompanied by eye movements.
 Why do we need to move our eyes to shift attention?
 We answered this question by inattentional blindness and
change detection examples.
 Both of these cases indicate that we miss objects or changes
in the environment that we are not paying attention to, but
when people are told where to look in a scene they can detect
the objects or changes they had previously missed.
 EYE MOVEMENTS, ATTENTION, AND
PERCEPTION
 There are two factors that determine how people shift
their attention by moving their eyes:

 Bottom-up, based primarily on physical

characteristics of the stimulus, and

 Top-down, based on the relation between the

observer and the scene— what the person knows
about the scene and the demands of a task that
involves objects in the scene.
 BOTTOM-UP DETERMINANTS OF EYE
MOVEMENTS
 Attention can be influenced by the physical
properties of the stimulus, such as color,
contrast, or movement.
 Capturing attention by stimulus is a bottom-up
process because it depends on the pattern of
light and dark, color and contrast in a stimulus.
 For example, the task of finding the people
wearing yellow hats in Figure would involve
bottom-up processing because it involves
responding to the physical property of color,
without considering the meaning.
 TOP-DOWN DETERMINANTS OF EYE
MOVEMENTS
 Top-down processing is also
associated with scene schemas—an
observer’s knowledge about what is
contained in typical scenes.
 The fact that people look longer at
things that seem out of place in a
scene means that attention is being
affected by their knowledge of what
is usually found in the scene.
 TOP-DOWN DETERMINANTS OF EYE
MOVEMENTS

 The way the person scanned the baseball

scene suggests that attention is influenced
by person’s knowledge and interests.
 This person appears to be interested in
baseball and have some knowledge about it.
 Where do you think a person with little
interest in baseball but a great deal of
interest in architecture might have looked?
 Most likely the person would pay more
attention to the buildings in the upper part of
the scene.
 Covert Attention: Directing Attention
Without Eye Movements

Location-Based Attention
 Michael Posner and coworkers (1978) were interested
in answering the following question:

 Does attention to a specific location improve our ability

to respond rapidly to a stimulus presented at that
location?

 To answer this, Posner used the precuing procedure

 Location-Based Attention

 The results of this

experiment, indicate that
observers reacted more
rapidly on valid trials than on
invalid trials.
 Posner interpreted this result
as showing that information
processing is more effective
at the place where attention
is directed.
 Object-Based Attention

 Experiments have used precueing to show that

attention can also be associated with specific
objects.

 Experiments studying object-based attention

have shown that when attention is directed to
one place on an object, the enhancing effect of
this attention spreads throughout the object.
 Object-Based Attention

 As participants were instructed to keep

their eyes on the +, one end of the
rectangle was briefly highlighted.
 This was the cue signal that indicated
where a target, would probably appear.
 In this example, the cue indicates that the
target is likely to appear in the upper part
of the right rectangle.
 The participants’ task was to press a
button when the target appeared
anywhere in the display.
 Reaction times were fastest when the
target appeared where the cue signal
predicted it would appear and slower at
other locations.
 Feature Integration Theory

 Remember that the ball’s

features—color (red), shape (round),
movement (to the right) —are
processed in different parts of the
person’s brain, so the ball’s features
are separated physiologically.

 The point of this example was that

even though observing the ball
activates separate areas in the brain,
we perceive one object, a red ball,
moving to the right.
 Feature Integration Theory

 Treisman proposed a theory, called feature integration theory, to explain how we

perceive initially separated features as part of the same object.
 The first step in processing an image of an object is the preattentive stage. In this
stage, objects are analyzed into separate features, i.e. the rolling red ball would be
analyzed into the features color (red), shape (round), and movement (to the right).
 Because each of these features is processed in a separate area of the brain, they exist
independently of one another at this stage of processing.
 Illusory Conjunctions
 According to Treisman, illusory
conjunctions occur because at the
beginning of the perceptual process
each feature exists independently of
the others. That is, features such as
“redness,” or “tilted line” are, at this
early stage of processing, not
associated with a specific object.

 They are “free floating”, and can

therefore be incorrectly combined if
there is more than one object.
 Illusory Conjunctions

 Although illusory conjunctions are usually demonstrated in

laboratory experiments, they can occur in other situations
 In a class demonstration to illustrate that observers sometimes
make errors in eyewitness testimony.
 In the demonstration, a male wearing a green shirt burst into
the class, grabbed a yellow purse that was sitting on a desk and
left the room. This event happened very rapidly.
 The task was to describe what happened as eyewitnesses to a
“crime.”
 One of the students reported that a male wearing a yellow shirt
grabbed a green purse from the desk! Interchanging the colors
of these objects is an example of illusory conjunctions
 Multitasking

 What is multitasking?

 Multitasking is the act of doing more than one

thing at the same time.

 Do you think multitasking is possible?

If Yes, How? If No, Why?

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THJgaznSBu8
 (Watch 3.47 sec. to the end)
Thank you for your listening