PS261 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: European Herring Gull, Illusory Contours, Railways Act 1921
Document Summary
Attention: a cognitive mechanism for selecting which stimuli to respond to or perceive from moment to moment. Animals (and we) can only attend to one or a few things at a time: attention is a limited resource. E. g: divided attention (e. g. texting and driving, search images (see below) Blue jays searching for computer prey in a central patch and 2 side patches at the same time. Prey are hidden among distractors (non-prey) and most prey is in central patch. Difficulty of central patch varied: easy or hard. Jays can find the prey in the central patch in either case. Jays find few prey in the side patches when the central patch is harder. Search images (basically fancy templates in our heads) E. g: pidgeon"s trained to search for black and brown seeds, relative proportions of seeds in the sample were manipulated.
