Lecture Notes on Cognition and Attention

Overview of Cognitive Psychology

• Definition: Area of psychology focused on mental processes such as thinking, memory, planning, reasoning, attention, and perception.

Attention

Key Goals of Today's Lecture

• Describe concepts of inattentional blindness and change blindness.
• Explain differences between feature search and conjunction search.
• Distinguish between top-down and bottom-up attention.
• Recognize how attention prioritizes emotion.

Inattentional Blindness

• Definition: The failure to see unexpected items in plain sight due to preoccupation of attention.
• Example Study: Simons & Chabris (1999) experiment regarding counting basketball passes, which led to missing an unexpected gorilla.
• Insights from Research:
  • Individuals who did not notice the unexpected item (gorilla) looked at it as often as those who did.
  • Eye-tracking studies suggest eyes may not direct focus on the unexpected events.

Change Blindness

• Definition: Difficulty in noticing large visual changes between scenes; arises from the failure to update visual representations.
• Comparison to Inattentional Blindness:
  • Inattentional blindness is due to focused attention; change blindness occurs due to lack of attention updates between views.

Visual Search: Feature Search vs. Conjunction Search

• **Visual Search Task Examples: **
  • Feature Search: e.g., Find a slanted line; utilizes primitive features that can pop out easily.
  • Conjunction Search: e.g., Find a green slanted line, requires attention to combine features.
• Feature Integration Theory (Treisman & Gelade, 1980):
  • Basic features can be processed in parallel; selective attention binds these features together.
  • Binding features into a coherent perception is a slower and serial process.

Top-down vs. Bottom-up Attention

• Top-down Attention:
  • Voluntary and strategic direction of attention, e.g., looking for a friend wearing red.
• Bottom-up Attention:
  • Reflexive attention that is grabbed by stimuli without conscious effort; e.g., hearing one's name in a noisy room (Cocktail party effect).

Attention and Emotion

• Influence of Emotion:
  • Attention tends to prioritize emotional information, especially in individuals sensitive to emotional cues (like those with anxiety).
  • Dot Probe Task (MacLeod et al., 1986): A method to assess attentional bias towards emotional stimuli.
  • Research indicates that anxious individuals have a bias towards negative emotional stimuli and may react faster to threatening images.
  • Cognitive Bias Modification: Techniques aimed at retraining biases away from negative perceptions.

Emotion-Induced Blindness Task

• Study Example: Assessment of how emotional stimuli can cause blindness to other visual information.

Conclusion

• Key Takeaway: Our attention is selective, often influenced by emotional contexts and the nature of the tasks at hand.
• Contact Information: For questions, reach out to Dr. Kate Crookes at firstyear-sps@uwa.edu.au.