PSYC105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Inattentional Blindness, Blue Arrow, Augmented Reality
1 Jun 2018
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Attention – Week 11
• What is attention?
o “the process of focusing conscious awareness, providing heightened
sensitivity to a limited range of experience requiring more extensive
information processing”
• Attention determines what we experience
• Why is attention necessary?
o “At any given moment, people’s awareness encompasses only a tiny
portion of the stimuli impinging of their sensory systems”
• A general mode of attention
o Sensory input → Sensory memory (Automatic, preattentive
processing) → Selector → Working memory (conscious, attentive
processing)
o Attentional mechanisms decide what information reaches awareness
and thus the focus of our thoughts and actions
o Attention is proposed to be the gate between sensory processing and
awareness
▪ All sensory input enter the sensory memory store where it is
processed pre-attentively
▪ Some of it is selected to pass through the gate into
consciousness
• The ‘cocktail party’ phenomenon
o Ability to focus one’s auditory attention on a particular stimulus while
filtering out a range of other stimuli
• Dichotic Listening Task
o Researcher would ask subject to put on headphones, an auditory
stimuli would be played in one ear, and another in a different ear
o Able for speech output (filter out) one of the stimuli
o Memory of unateended channel (ear)
▪ Switch in language – nobody notices
▪ Switch between forwards/backwards – this wont change
▪ Switch between male/female voices – you DO notice
• Filter Model of Attention
o Filter model suggested that information is selected based on early
sensory properties (pitch, loudness etc.) – people will notice these kind
of changes
o Attention restricts information available for further processing
o Information selected based on physical characteristics (preattentive
processing)
▪ This is known as early selection theory (preattentive
processing)
• How can we tell what is pre-attentive?
o Anne Treisman demonstrated this clearly – visual pop-outs (orientation
and colour); occurred before we needed attention
o This is also known as feature integration theory:
▪ Certain basic features are processed quickly in parallel
(preattentively)
▪ But attention serves to bind simple features together
▪ This binding process is slow and serial
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Attention is proposed to be the gate between sensory processing and awareness. All sensory input enters the sensory memory store where it is processed pre- attentively. Some of it is selected to pass through the gate into consciousness. Failures of awareness: change blindness and inattentional blindness: change blindness, change blindness is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a change in a visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it. Inattentional blindness difficult: inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is a psychological lack of attention that is not associated with any vision defects or deficits. If yellow motorcycle, blue is mismatch, yellow is match: does feature-based attention affect braking latency or even collisions, yes, affected braking latency. Attention helps us deal with what could be a very overhwleming world. Attention can act to select information at different stages of processes (based on outputs of feature-detectors or more complex processing of meaning)
