PCI Attention

Attention (William James)

Taking possession by the mind of one out of several simultaneous thoughts or objects.

Physical Limits (Body)

Limitations imposed by physics and our body, like only looking at one thing.

Central Bottleneck

A mental limit preventing us from extensively processing multiple things at once.

Attentional Selection

The brain's choice of which environmental stimuli to extensively process.

Overt Attention

Directing attention by physically moving your eyes to look at a stimulus.

Covert Attention

Directing mental focus to a stimulus without physically moving your eyes.

Two-Letter Experiment

Study showing that identifying two high-speed letters simultaneously exceeds mental capacity.

Global Neuronal Workspace Theory

Consciousness theory where stimuli passing a pre-frontal bottleneck trigger widespread brain activity.

Toll Booth Analogy

Visual metaphor showing how a bottleneck forces multiple parallel inputs to process one-by-one.

Vigilance (Ecological)

Actively monitoring the surrounding environment for predators and threats.

Nocturnal Bottleneck

Evolutionary era forcing mammalian ancestors into the night, requiring sensory interrupt systems.

Concentration vs. Vigilance

Balancing voluntary, goal-directed focus (concentration) against involuntary environmental alarms (vigilance).

Biological Interrupts

Highly robust, involuntary sensory alarms evolved in animals to escape predators.

Bottom-up (Exogenous) Attention

Rapid, involuntary attention triggered automatically by high sensory salience.

Top-down (Endogenous) Attention

Slower, voluntary attention driven by internal goals, memory, and tasks.

Salience

How much a stimulus stands out based on basic low-level features.

Explore-Exploit Dilemma

Choosing between exploiting known high-value rewards or exploring for potentially better options.

Mind-Wandering

Attentional drift partly driven by an evolutionary biological urge to explore.

Stafford et al. (2012)

Study showing that early task exploration yields better long-term motor learning.

Explore-Exploit Shift

Lifespan change from high exploration in youth to high exploitation in adulthood.

Phone Obsession

Repetitive device checking driven by reinforcing, highly reliable reward exploitation.

Global Feature Selection

Attending to a feature (e.g., red) enhances it across the entire visual field.

Spatial Selection

Directing selective attention or visual processing to a specific regional area.

Dorsal vs. Ventral Pathways

Separation of dorsal ('Where') and ventral ('What') pathways, preventing combined feature-location selection.

Parallel Feature Processing

Simultaneous processing of individual features across the entire visual field at once.

Serial Feature Processing

Slow, capacity-limited search required to combine features at a location.

Feature Dimensions vs. Values

Dimensions are categories (color, motion); values are specific instances (red, leftward).

Feature Integration Theory

FIT; pre-attentive feature maps are parallel, but focused attention binds features together.

Phenomenal Consciousness

Subjective visual experience, which Ned Block argues overflows limited cognitive access.

Change Blindness

Failure to detect major visual changes during a brief transient disruption.

Blank-Screen Sandwich

Flicker paradigm inserting a blank frame to disrupt motion signals, hiding changes.