W4 L1 - Determinants of selective attention

involuntary attention

  • needed for survival

vocabulary

attention driven by other things

  • bottom up

  • stimulus-driven

  • exogenous

  • involuntary attention

  • reflexive attention

attention driven by goal/ under contol

  • top down

  • goal-driven

  • endogenous

  • attentional control

  • executive attention

  • voluntary attention

biased competition theory - Desomine & Duncan (1995)

  • competition among multiple models

  • top down vs. bottom up

stimulus-driven attentional selection

stimuli of high salience

  • Salient colour singleton - “odd one out”

  • singleton attentional capture task

  • can top-down mechanisms focus attention only on shaoes? NO

  • stimulus-driven selection - Broadbent, 1958; Treisman & Gelade, 1980

bottom up BEFORE top-down

FIRST STAGE

  • initial sweep across visual field, entirely bottom up

  • calculation of local salience

  • attention → location with highest local feature contrast / salience

SECOND STAGE

  • is selected item target?

  • attention shifts to item that is line with respect to salience.

the role of the “Attentional Window”

  • attentional window is a specific field of vision we’d have 

  • only stimuli in that field of vision can capture our attention

contingent capture - Folk & Remington (1992)

  • attentional capture NOT stimulus-driven

  • attention can only be captured by stimuli relevant to our goasl

  • this relevance might be less obvious in some cases

study

  • invalid cues produced slower RTs - attentional capture

  • colour cues capture attention when target was defined on colour

  • onset cues captures attention when target was defined on onset

  • but not vice-versa

Bacon and Egeth (1994)

  • search for singleton shape → singleton detection search strategy

  • “spot the single one out”

  • shape no longer singleton 

  • colour singleton no longer interferes

Theuswes (2004)

  • colour singleton DOES interfere when target non-singleton if local salience is maintained

abrupt onsets - Yantis and colleagues (1988)

  • something suddenly appears

  • only abrupt ones can produce stimulus driven capture

  • things that move or loone (come towards you) catch attention - Franconeri & Simons (2003)

display wide settings: another argument against stimulus-driven capture - Gibson & Kelsey (1998)

  • attention tasks usually begin with some kind of change to display

  • task stimuli onset, or offset, or change colour, etc.

attention capture

beyond physical salience

  • sometimes things seem to attract attention because of their meaning

  • eg. threat

  • sometimes things seem to attract attention because of meaning or personal relevance

familiarity/expertise can influence attention

  • experts in american football faster to notice changes in football related images - Werner & Thies (2010)

  • expert musicians more distracted by musical instrument - Ro, Friggel & Lavie (2009)

  • more recent theories highlight the role of ‘selection history’ or reward associations