Memory and Attention Lecture Notes

Attention and Memory

Dr. Michael Barham discusses memory and attention, a topic related to his PhD thesis.
Questions will be addressed in a Q&A session after the lecture.
Past sessions led by Leah have received positive feedback and are considered valuable for revision.
Past sessions this week will cover attention, memory processes, and APA 7 tips for assessment preparation.

Attention is linked to memory.
Attention is the ability to focus on and process a limited amount of information from the available stimuli.
Modern society presents an overwhelming amount of information through social media, news, and entertainment.
Attention helps focus on a smaller subset of information, allowing the brain to process and remember it.
Attention is the initial step in forming a memory; we can't remember something if we don't pay attention to it.
It is not easy to recall event details if attention was insufficient.
Attention has limits.

Failure to notice or recognize something because attention wasn't directed to it.

Measure how people sift through large amounts of visual information.
Examples: finding a friend in a crowd, screening titles on Netflix, searching for food in a cupboard.

The lecturer guides the audience through a visual search task to highlight attention principles.
In one example, the odd stimulus (a purple M among green Ms) is easily found because it differs on a single characteristic (color).
In a more challenging version, participants take longer to find the odd stimulus (a purple F) because they need to attend to two characteristics (letter and color).

Attention works like a spotlight, scanning around and processing only the information it focuses on.
In difficult visual search tasks, attention scans around, processing each stimulus in turn until the odd one is found.
Attention limits large amounts of information into smaller amounts we can compute through an attentional spotlight.

Attention helps prevent us from being overwhelmed by large amounts of information.
It's difficult for our brain to process multiple things simultaneously.
Example: hearing someone say your name in a crowded environment quickly grabs your attention.
At any one time, we process multiple things, but attention shifts to the most important signal.
The attended channel (what we're paying attention to) is processed and formed into memories, while the unattended channel (background noise) is not.

Dividing attention is a myth; it is not possible to equally attend to multiple things at once.
We rapidly shift attention between multiple things, but this comes at a cost.
Dividing attention is resource-dependent; it depletes cognitive resources.
If tasks are similar (e.g., reading a book and watching TV), it is harder to share attention because they compete for the same parts of the brain.
If tasks are different (e.g., walking outside while on a phone call), the brain can automate one process, making it easier to share attention.
Dividing attention is not a good strategy for learning; full attention on a single thing is best.
Attention is the precursor to memories; what we attend to is what we may recall later.

Memories allow us to recall events from the past.
Memories give us a historical record of experiences.
Memories aid in survival and safety.
What occurs is not always the same as what we remember.
Memory gives us the gist of what has occurred, but specific details are often unreliable.
Memory is imperfect, but this imperfection may have advantages.

Example: A caveman attacked by a saber-tooth tiger needs to remember the event to react similarly in the future.
However, the memory should not be too specific; it should generalize to similar situations.
A good memory says,