Chapter 6: 

Opportunity Costs

  • If you have a dollar, you can spend a dollar, and once you spend it one place you can’t spend it another place. Once you use up your money, you have used up your funds. If you take this opportunity then you miss out on other opportunities.
  • Visual attention - If I am attending to one thing, I can’t attend to something else, at least not at the same level
    • Functionality of the superior colliculus - important for orienting behavior from the visual field
    • Visual scanning - quickly, helps to get the gist of the scene, captures things that are relevant and ignore the rest
    • Eye tracker - laser that is interfaced to a computer that tracks where your fovea is oriented to
    • Fixation and saccadic eye movement
    • Fixation - fixing my fovea on something or someone
    • Saccadic eye movement - eyes are constantly moving around a little bit (don’t notice cause we have adapted to it)
    • Overt attention vs covert attention
    • Overt attention - what you are currently focusing your fovea on
    • Covert attention - everything that you are able to attend to or see that is not in your main focal point (not directly observed by the fovea)
    • Relates to opportunity costs because fovea can only focus on one thing (selectively control where fovea is focused on) and cannot pay as much attention to everything else
    • Multitasking - nowhere near as good a multitasker as you think you are, only have so much attention, ability to process what you are splitting your attention among, rapidly decreases

What controls visual attention

  • Attentional/visual capture - the ones that is different pops out, “pop out affect”
    • Novelty is critical/fundamental to use and our processing, we attend to things that are novel
    • There can be distractors that can slow you down
  • Scene schema - something that does not fit the schema, we will visually attend to it (will spend more time looking at things that do not belong)
    • What belongs
    • Where we usually find things
    • Task demands
    • Scene statistics help explain unknown situations

Brain region support for visual attention

  • 6.21, 6.22, 6.23
  • 6.21: an image of a face superimposing an image of a house
  • Fusiform facial area and parahippocampal place area
  • When a person attends to the house, more activity in PPA than FFA, and vice versa so when a person attends to a man, more activity in the FFA than the PPA
  • 6.22
  • The brain is heavily involved in correlating overt and overt attention
  • Correlation does not mean causation

Figure 6.26

  • One group is wearing a white t-shirt, and one is wearing a black T-shirt (two different teams)
  • 2 basketballs are being passed among team members while they are moving
  • Man in a gorilla suit
  • The participant is asked to count how many times they pass the basketball on the white team
  • During this time, a gorilla walks in and bangs his chest
  • Half subjects will not see the gorilla (selectively attending)

Inattentional blindness

  • Figures 6.16 and 6.17
    • 46% fail to report
  • Change blindness - why would this occur
    • Happens in movies (continuity errors)

Impact of distractors on visual attention

  • Impact of visual distractors (figure 6.22)
  • Perceptual capacity and perceptual load
    • As we split our perceptual load up we are nowhere near as good at attending to the things we split it among (better when attending to only one thing)

Autism spectrum disorder - spend more time focusing on the face of the individual doing the action, but the focal points are more at the shoulders (less time focusing on the face of indivuals)