Human Cognition Chapter 5

What is attention

Our ability to selectively extra information from our environment. You can control the orienting of your own attention to prioritize some perceptual inputs over others. But what if we couldn’t control our attention? Unitateral Neglect

Unilateral neglect

A failure of attention caused by damage to (usually right) parietal cortex. This condition is a failure of attention caused by damage to the right parietal cortex. The right parietal cortex is described as a “strong attention center” that “processes left visual environments”. This means that when this area is damaged, people might “ignore all inputs from one side of visual space (usually the left)”

Right Parietal Cortex (Unitateral neglect)

Strong attention center. Processes left visual environment. Ignore all inputs from one side of visual space (usually the left)

Selective Attention

Our ability to selectively extract information from our environments. You can control the orienting of your own attention to prioritize some perceptual inputs over others. Can do this in multiple sensory domains, including vision and audition. Selectively tune out (or filter) information you aren’t attending.

Tuning Attention (Selective attention)

Selectively tune out (or filter) information you aren’t attending. Attention is tuned to white targets, so you tune out black non-targets. You do keep some information about the unattended channel (it’s not all totally lost). If asked later, you can report the physical properties of the unattended channel, but not semantic content. Selective attention involves the inhibition (or suppression) of unwanted or distracting information. Set up filters that let relevant information pass through but stops irrelevant information from being processed. But some distractors can break through

Selective attention example

Think of your attention like a spotlight. Selective attention is the ability to point that spotlight at whatever you want to focus on, and dim it on everything else. You can do this with what you see, what you hear, and so on. It’s like a filter that lets in the important stuff and blocks out the noise. Even though you’re not paying attention to some things, your brain might still catch a bit of information about them, especially if it’s something physical, but not necessarily the meaning of it. These filters are usually good at keeping our distractions, but sometimes a really strong distraction can grab your attention anytime

The Cocktail Party Effect

Semantically relevant words with “pop out” form the unattended channel. The ability to focus on one conversation in a noisy room full of other conversations and sounds, and tune out everything else. But, if your name is called from across the room, your attention instantly shifts to it, even though you were previously ignoring it. This shows that while you’re filtering out a lot, your brain is still monitoring for important information, like your name

Attentional Capture

When a salient stimulus breaks through your controlled filter, causing you to orient your attention to it. Typically, measured as the difference in response time when a distractors is present VS absent in a display. ___is when something unexpected or attention, grabbing, like a sudden loud noise or a bright flash, pulls your focus away from what you were originally paying attention to

Look-But-Fail-To-See

Attention is not simply a matter of what you’re looking at.

Inattentional Blindness

Failing to notice a prominent stimulus, even when you’re looking right at it or when it is in plain view. Perception requires more than just having a stimulus in front of your eyes (or ears)

Seeing is more than just what you’re looking at. You need perception and attention. Highlights the limit to what our brain can process at a time, and how our brain will “fill in the gaps”

Inattentional Blindness Example Look-but-fail-to-see

Is like not seeing a gorilla walk right in front of you when you’re busy counting basketball passes. Even though the gorilla is there, your brain is so focused on the task of counting that it doesn’t even register the large, obvious stimulus. So you look but you fail to see

Change Blindness Look-but-fail-to-see

Observers don’t notice changes to a visual scene. Imagine you’re talking to someone, and they blink. If you’re not paying close attention or if there’s a brief interruption, you might not even notice that the blink happened.

That’s ____a small change in a visual scene that goes unnoticed because our attention isn’t focused on it.

Changed Blindness Explained

Observers don’t notice the changes to a visual scene from one instance to another. This is because our brains prioritize certain information and can filter out or fail to process even obvious changes if our attention isn’t directed towards them. It’s all about what we’re actively processing versus what’s just passively in our field of vision

Changed Blindness Example

Think=Continuity errors in movies/TV.

Think about a scene where a character is wearing a specific necklace. Then in the very next shot, the necklace is suddenly gone, or it’s a different one altogether. If the change is subtle or happens during a moment of visual disruption (like a quick cut or a character looking away), viewers often don’t notice it. Their brains fill in the gap, assuming continuity, even when there isn’t any. It’s a classic “look-but-fail-to-see” moment

Priming

Reminder-Perception depends on a network of detectors (think feature nets). Detectors you have recent or frequent experience with will fire more readily in the future (they’re primed”). priming can also come from your expectations about what an incoming stimulus will be. You can make sure you perceive something important by priming the relevant detectors so they;re on “high alert”

Priming Example

Looking for your friend in a crowd is easier if you know what they’re wearing. If you know your friend is wearing a blue hat, you can prime your blue detectors to make sure you don’t miss anything that might be important. But controlled priming takes effort, we can only do it selectively. Priming some detectors takes resources away from other detectors

Can use priming to explain look-but-fail-to-see errors

Primed detectors will fire

Detectors that are”t primed won’t fire (so you don’t see what you’re nor expecting to see)

Why priming works

Priming works because our brains are constantly trying to make sense of the world efficiently. When you’re primed for something, your brain has already prepared its “detectors” to recognize it. So, when that expected thing appears, your brain processes it quickly and easily

What if priming doesn’t happen

However, if something unexpected pops up, and your brain hasn’t been primed for it, those specific detectors don’t get activated. It’s like they’re asleep. Since they’re not firing, you don’t consciously register that thing, even if it’s right in front of you that’s how the look-but-fail-to see part

Can use priming to explain look-but-fail-to-see errors

Imagine your brain has a “threshold for awareness” like a minimum level something needs to reach to get your attention. Below that line, things are easily missed. Then there’s the “baseline level of activation for detectors” this is how active your brain’s “detectors” are normally, without any specific priming

Priming-Threshold for awareness

When you’re primed for something, it’s like those detectors get a little boost, raising their baseline activation. This makes it easier for them to cross that “threshold for awareness” when the stimulus appears. If you’re not primed, the stimulus might not activate the detectors enough to reach that awareness threshold and poof-you miss it

Priming in a bottom up way

Priming can be stimulus-driven (bottoms up)

A stimulus you’ve encountered recently (repetition priming)

Takes no effort/ is automatic-another word for bottom-up attention is exogenous

Priming can be expectation-driven (top-down)

Under your control. Only prime goal-relevant detectors. Can’t prime detectors you aren’t expecting to use-another word for top-down attention is endogenous

Priming (bottom-up and top-down)

Can also be applied to locations in space instead of specific features

Bottom-up priming

Keep your eyes on the cross in the middle. When a letter appears in one of the boxes, say it out loud. Because top-down priming has limits, it has costs if we use it wrong

Spaital Attention

Lots of researchers focus on ___.Attention as a “spotlight” or “beam” that you can move

How do we “move attention”?

Top-down signals that originate in networks/systems in frontal and parietal cortex. The orientating system disengages attention from one target and shifts to another. The altering system maintains an alert state to the brain. The executive system controls voluntary actions-most processes in the brain involve distributed brain regions

How do we decide to “shine the beam”?

On physically salient things, like an ambulance bottom-up. Toward things/locations you expect to be relevant (top-down endogenous). Away from things/locations you might not expect to be interesting

The ultra-rare-item effect

Rare items are often overlooked. A psychological phenomenon where people experience catastrophically low detection rates when visually searching for targets that appear with extremely low frequently

The Ultra-rare-item effect example

Airport baggage screening-security personel look through x-ray images of luggage. Dangerous items like a knife or a rare explosive device might appear in a tiny fracture of a percent of all bags scanned. Because bags with threats are extraordinary rare, screeners are much more likely to miss them

Individual differences-spaital attention

You might notice something the person next to you doesn’t

The binding problem

If basic features are processed quickly and in parallel, how do those features become bound to allow for object recognition? The feature integration theory

The feature integration theory

Early perception (pre-attention) detects features, and focused attention “glues’ them together after feature perception. But see things by first noticing their separate parts, like colour and shape. Then, our brain puts those parts together to form the whole object, If we’re not paying enough attention, or if the parts aren’t distinct enough, our brain might not be able to put them together correctly, and we might miss seeing the object

Divided attention

Focus so far has been on one target among distractors but what if you need to attend to more than one thing at a time? Sometimes divided attention is easy, like walking while listening to music or knitting while watching TV. However, sometimes divided attention is very hard like listening to a podcast while you watch TV or by reading a book while you listen to music

Divided attention fact

The mechanisms that help us pay attention are resource limited. Generally, if the resources required to perform both tasks overlap, it’s hard. if they don’t, it’s easy.

How hard dividing attention is

There’s little overlap in the demands of the two tasks, but they do interfere with each other. Associated with slower response times, more likely to overlook traffic signals and more accidents. This inference effect gods away if your’re talking to a passenger instead of on the phone, likely because the passenger can also respond to changes In road conditions. This tells us that different tasks compete for some shared resources

Executive control

is required to oversee/control essentially all of your conscious cognitive functions. Different tasks carry a different load (the amount of effort or resources they require)-more load=more executive control and less space for any other task.

The cognitive ability to allocate mental resources to process two or more concurrent stimuli or tasks simultaneously, managed by the brain's supervisory executive control networks

Attentional filtering

The cognitive brain mechanism that limits processing capacity to focus on specific relevant sensory stimuli while blocking or weakening distracting information

Inattentional blindness

A psychological event where you do not see something right in front of you because your mind is busy with another task

Feature priming

An implicit memory phenomenon where seeing a specific visual attribute (such as a color, shape, or orientation) in one trial speeds up your ability to detect that same attribute in a subsequent task

Spaital priming

A psychological phenomenon where people find and react to a target object faster when it appears in the same location it did in recent trials

Priming costs

Cognitive delays or performance impairments that happen when prior exposure actually slows down or harms your response to a later task

Attentional “spotlight”

A cognitive model describing how visual attention moves across our field of view to highlight specific information while filtering out background distractions