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Lecture 3 - Attention_2025_ForUpload

Lecture 3 - Attention

Overview

  • Focuses on understanding attention, its types, mechanisms, deficits, and its relationship with perception.

Attention

  • Defined as the ability to focus on specific stimuli in the environment, leading to the exclusion of others.

  • Serves as a gateway to perception, awareness, learning, memory, and knowledge.

Types of Attention

  • Selective Attention: Focusing on one item while ignoring others; filters out large amounts of environmental information.

  • Divided Attention: Distributing attention across multiple tasks. With practice, people can perform multiple tasks simultaneously.

Mechanisms of Attention

  • Location-based: Moving attention from one place to another.

  • Object-based: Directing attention towards particular objects.

Research Method: Dichotic Listening

  • Colin Cherry (1953): Assessed how people process competing auditory stimuli through shadowing, where participants repeat a message to ensure focus.

  • Showed listeners could identify basic characteristics of unattended messages (e.g., gender of the speaker) but not the content.

Models of Selective Attention

  1. Broadbent’s Filter Model (Early Selection): Filters messages before analysis for meaning based on physical characteristics.

  2. Treisman’s Attenuation Theory (Intermediate Selection): Messages are analyzed in stages; unattended messages are weakened but not completely blocked.

  3. MacKay’s Late Selection Model: Meaning is accessed for all input before making a selection.

Evidence Against Early Selection Model

  • Cocktail Party Effect: Notable recognition of one's name in a noisy environment.

  • Dear Aunt Jane Experiment: Participants reported meaningful messages from mixed inputs, suggesting semantic processing.

Divided Attention and Load Theory

  • Load Theory (Lavie, 2010): Describes the relationship between task difficulty and processing capacity.

  • High-load tasks require more cognitive resources than low-load tasks.

Automatic vs. Controlled Processing

  • Automatic processing occurs without intention and consumes fewer cognitive resources but is limited to well-practiced tasks.

  • Stroop Effect (J.R. Stroop, 1935): Demonstrates the interference of automatic processing (reading words) on color naming tasks.

Attention Deficits

  • Inattentional Blindness: Failure to notice unexpected items when focused elsewhere.

  • Change Blindness: Difficulty in detecting changes in visual scenes.

  • Spatial Neglect: A condition where individuals ignore one side of their visual field following unilateral brain damage.

Integrating Attention and Visual Perception

  • Feature Integration Theory (FIT): Proposed by Anne Treisman, suggests attention is necessary for integrating features into coherent objects.

  • Stages:

    • Preattentive stage: Automatic feature analysis without attention.

    • Focused attention stage: Attention combines features.

  • Illusory Conjunctions: Occur when features from different stimuli are miscombined, highlighting the importance of attention in perception.