Attention

1. Attention What is it? What control do We have over it? cogch3 Attention

2. Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking of possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence….. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal more effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which …. Is called distraction. - William James (1890) cogch3 Attention

3. Read the bold print. Somewhere Among hidden the in most the spectacular Rocky Mountains cognitive near abilities Central City is Colorado the an ability old to miner select hid one a messagebox from of another. gold. We Although do several this hundred by people focusing have our looked attention for on it, certain they cues have such not as found type it style. What do you remember from the regular print text? What does this tell you about selective attention? cogch3 Attention

4. Views of Attention • As an Information Filter • As a Limited Resource • As Mental Resource • Attention as a Feature Binder cogch3 Attention

5. Attention as Information Filter Attention serves to pare down the vast amount of information in our environment (sensed) to just a small amount we can focus on. cogch3 Attention

6. Attention Perceptual processes - Parallel & Unlimited Attention - Serial and Limited At some point there is a bottleneck. cogch3 Attention

7. We need to select which input will be attended to (and further processed) and which will be ignored (and lost). Questions 1) Is bottleneck before or after meaning has been processed? 2) How do we select what to attend to? cogch3 Attention

8. Where is the filter? If early, it blocks out a lot of information, but it saves the cognitive system the work of having to process ALL input. cogch3 Attention

9. Dichotic Listening Task (Cherry, 1953) - two messages presented Shadowing task - repeat message presented in one ear as you are hearing it. Dependant Measures 1) Shadowing performance (errors, hesitations, omissions) indicate that attention has been diverted. 2) What is recalled from the unattended message? cogch3 Attention

10. Dichotic Listening Task cogch3 Attention

11. Dichotic Listening Results Physical attributes of unattended channel aredetected (e.g., Male . vs. female voice; Human vs. musical instruments). Semantic (meaning) attributes of unattended channel were missed (e.g., Don’t notice switch to foreign language). No content was remembered, even when the unattended stream was the same word presented 35 times (Moray, 1959). cogch3 Attention

12. What it tells us about the filter Early selection for physical features (location, color, pitch of voice) but filtering does not occur due to meaning. Further studies, however found that some meaningful words do capture some peoples attention. cogch3 Attention

13. Moray (1959) - “cocktail party effect” subjects could often (1/3 of time) detect their own name, “fire” or context relevant words on unattended channel. How could this happen if unattended information does not pass through filter for pattern recognition? cogch3 Attention

14. Why do only some people notice relevant unattended words? Conway, Cowan & Bunting (2001) Working Memory (WM)capacity Gave participants a task that taxes WM capacity (math verification task plus word memory) to measure WM capacity. Those who detect their name in the irrelevant message have relatively low WM capacities, suggesting that they have difficulty blocking out, or inhibiting, distracting information. cogch3 Attention

15. Results Those who detect their name in the irrelevant message have relatively low WM capacities, suggesting that they have difficulty blocking out, or inhibiting, distracting information. cogch3 Attention

16. Salience The meaningfulness of the information at the moment. For example, you might pass by an advertisement for snacks everyday without noticing, but if you are hungry, it will grab your attention. cogch3 Attention

17. Treisman (1960) Found that attention could be easily switched to the unattended ear when semantic content of the message shifted cogch3 Attention

18. Problem Does this require that all information would have to be processed for meaning (very labor intensive). This leaves us with the question of why, if the system is doing all this work to process for information, why it then gets blocked from further awareness. cogch3 Attention

19. Treisman Attenuation ModelAttenuation = loss of signal strength Cogch4 Attention

20. The Dictionary Unit • Both messages gets passed on to the dictionary unit Threshold = Smallest signal strength that can just be detected Easily detected cogch3 Attention

21. Attention as a Limited Resource Spot Light/Zoom Lens Metaphor • Can be directed to specific areas • Can be diffuse or focused • - trade off in concentration • Automatic of consciously directed • Limited capacity cogch3 Attention

22. Spotlight is flexible Experimental subjects can control whether they focus on a specific target (the middle letter of a five letter word) or spread their attention (across all the letters. La Berge, 1983) cogch3 Attention

23. LaBerge (1983) Participants complete one of two tasks per trial The primary task required subjects to categorize (a) five-letter words, or to categorize the middle letter of (b) five-letter words or (c) five-letter nonwords. The probe task required the subjects to respond when the digit 7 appeared in one of the five letter positions. cogch3 Attention

24. Evidence in Favour of the Zoom-lens Model • Mean reaction time to the probe as a function of probe position. The probe was presented at the time that a letter string would have been presented. Data from LaBerge (1983).

25. Attention as mental Resource • Attention is more like a limited resource • Kahneman’s (1973) capacity theory • When a particular task demands lots of processing resources, then other tasks get fewer resources. No task Hard task Easy task Attention capacity

26. Allocation of attention is intentional Depends on • Interest • Arousal level • Complexity of the task • Distractors cogch3 Attention

27. Dual Task vs. Single Task Studies Strayer and Johnson (2001) Volunteers perform a simple simulated driving task (using a joystick to make a cursor follow a dot moving randomly back and forth across the screen). At random intervals, the dot would turn either green or red. On a “red light,” participants were supposed to press the “brake” button on the joystick. cogch3 Attention

28. After practice a secondary task was added: DV – reaction to red light. • Found no difference between people who used a handheld or hands-free cell phone. • no difference between radio/audiobook listeners and the driving-only condition. • However, the cell-phone talkers missed more than twice as many red lights as the other participants. cogch3 Attention

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30. In addition to the accuracy problems, cell phone users also showed slower reaction times compared to when they were driving alone. cogch3 Attention

31. Why, are conversations distracting? In a second experiment, they had participants drive over “easy” and “difficult” courses. The volunteers were first asked to simply repeat words to the experimenter over the telephone. Next they were asked to generate a new word starting with the last letter of the word the experimenter gave them (for example if the experimenter said “salmon,” the volunteer could respond “night”). cogch3 Attention

32. Results No significant difference in errors on the easy course. On the difficult course, when drivers had to generate words in response, they made significantly more errors cogch3 Attention

33. So the key seems to be not simply that drivers are having a conversation, but that they are actively generating responses. Not Fun Facts: Cellphone use increase the risk of crashes to the same level as a BAC of .08. 80% of crashes and 67% of near crashes involve distracted drivers. cogch3 Attention

34. Cell Phone Use (another study) Hyman et al. (2009) Cell phone users less likely (25%) than non-users (51%) to notice a unicyling clown!!! cogch3 Attention

35. 2012 National Survey on Distracted Driving Attitudes and Behaviors • Nearly half (48%) of drivers admit to answering their cell phones while driving. • Of those who answered their phones while driving, 58% of drivers continued to drive while talking on the phone. • In the survey, 24% of drivers reported that they are willing to make a phone call while driving. • One in 10 drivers surveyed said that, at least sometimes, they send text messages or emails while driving. • Of the drivers surveyed, 14% said they read text messages or emails while driving. • A majority of respondents supported laws that banned talking on cell phones, texting, or emailing while driving.

36. 2012 Texting Pedestrian Study Researchers from the University of Washington monitored 20 of Seattle's busiest intersections and observed the following: • Pedestrians who text are 4x less likely to look before crossing the street, cross in crosswalks, or obey traffic signals. • They also found that texting pedestrians take an average of two seconds longer to cross the street.

37. Multi-tasking Ophir et al. (2009) Correlation between multitasking and distractibility. When asked to do two tasks at once, participants who reported being multitaskers performed less well on the main task than did non-multitaskers. Perhaps multi-taskers are just less able to focus attention. cogch3 Attention

38. Attention as a Feature Binder Treisman Feature Integration Model of Attention Remember the What and the Where/How systems we discussed in the last chapter. This view of attention suggest that features are detected by the What system automatically (without drawing on attentional resources). Binding information together using both the What and the Where/How systems requires attentional resources.

39. Demonstration • I will show you a scene quickly. • Report first the black numbers. • Report what you see at each of the 4 locations. Mask +++

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43. Report first the black numbers. • Report what you saw at each of the 4 locations.

44. Illusionary conjunctions • We tend to put different features from different objects together. • Some brain damaged patients (parietal lobe) show illusionary conjunctions even when the patients were allowed to view the stimuli for 10 seconds.

45. Feature Integration Theory Find the Green X X X X X O O X X X X X X X O X X X O X O X X O X X X X Feature search Conjunction search Treisman & Gelade 1980

46. Which is more difficult? Find

47. Which is more difficult? Find

48. Typical Findings & interpretation • Feature targets pop out • flat display size function • Conjunction targets demand serial search • non-zero slope

49. Feature integration theory Attention is the “glue” that combines the information from the whatand where systems.

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