PSYC2050 Lecture 10: Attention (continued)
Lecture 10 – Attention (continued)
Attention vs Consciousness
• Are they the same thing?
• How is important information selected pre-consciously?
Early Attention Research
• Historical Research
o Helmholtz (1867/1925)
• Performed the first covert attention experiment
• Stimulus is too big to attend to completely so have to attend to
certain areas
• Covert attention is looking at something but attending to something
else
• Overt attention is looking at what you are attending to
o Cocktail Party Effect
• Hearing something like your name in another conversation and
attending to it
• Dichotic Listening
o Two messages (one was being attended to)
• Unattended Message
▪ People able to report the gender, tone and pitch of voice
▪ People could usually tell if the voice said their name
▪ People unable to report the meaning of the message and what
it was telling them
Current Visual Attention Tasks
• Perceptual Load
• Working Memory Load
Processing Capacity
• Kahnemann (1973)
o Limitations on processing rather than structure
o Attention is the process of allocating resources to inputs
o Number of concurrent tasks that can be performed depends on difficulty
o The pool of available resources is increased under arousal (motivation)
Document Summary
Current visual attention tasks: perceptual load, working memory load. 1980s - new tasks and approaches: visual cognition revolution, response latency the primary dependent variable for simple tasks, time in milliseconds from onset of stimulus to response, called reaction time. Increases as stimulus identification, decision making or response selection becomes more difficult. Visual search: feature search (pop-out) search, red x among lots of black xs, conjuction search, red x among black xs and red circles. Individual feature maps give the location of specific features: automatic processing of stimulus into elementary features, activity in individual map can be read without focused attention, attention required to bind features into an object. Individual maps project onto a single location map. Limitations of fit: features don"t always pop out, conjuctions can sometimes pop out, sometimes configural patterns can over-ride basic features. Visual search: preattentive, features, parallel, pop out, flat slope, attentive, conjunctions, serial, no pop out, steep slope.
