Attention and Consciousness

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Attention and Consciousness

• Chapter 3

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Outline

• The Nature of Attention and Consciousness
• Attention
• Vigilance and Signal Detection
• Search
• Selective Attention
• Divided Attention
• Cognitive Neuroscientific Approaches to Attention

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1.The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

• Attention
• Is the means by which we actively process a
  limited amount of information from the enormous
  amount of information available through our
  senses, our stored memories, and our other
  cognitive processes
• Consciousness
• More directly concerned with awareness it
  includes both the feeling of awareness and the
  content of awareness, some of which may be under
  the focus of attention

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1.The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

• Different conceptions of consciousness
• Biopsychological
• different levels of arousal (sleep, coma,
  hyperactivity)
• Meta-cognitive
• Reflection on your own cognitive processes
• Being aware of cognitive processes
• Psychoanalytic
• Unconscious information we do not have access
  to it in normal awakened state
• Phenomenological
• What it is like to have an experience of
  something
• Individual, subjective aspects of experience

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1.The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

• Relationship between attention and consciousness
• Attention Consciousness
• No attention No Consciousness
• Attention No Consciousness
• No attention Consciousness

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?

• Can you provide an example of each of the
  possible relationships between attention and
  consciousness?

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1.The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

• Preconscious Processing
• Information that is available for cognitive
  processing but that currently lies outside of
  conscious awareness exists at the preconscious
  level of awareness

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1.The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

• Preconscious Processing
• Priming
• Processing of certain stimuli is facilitated by
  prior presentation of the same or similar stimuli
• Sometimes we are aware of the prime sometimes we
  are not
• Even when we are not aware of the prime, the
  prime will influence the processing of the target

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1.The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

• Preconscious Processing
• Antony Marcel (1983)
• Participants had to classify series of words into
  various categories (e.g. pine-plant)
• Primes where words with two meanings such as palm
  followed by target word (tree or hand)
• Task outline
• Is this a plant?
• Prime PALM
• Target - TREE

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1.The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

• Preconscious Processing
• Antony Marcel (1983) (cont.)
• If the participant was consciously aware of
  seeing the word palm, the mental pathway for
  only one meaning was activated
• If the word palm was presented so briefly that
  the person was unaware of seeing the word, both
  meanings of the word appeared to be activated

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1.The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

• Preconscious Processing
• Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
• We try to remember something that is known to be
  stored in memory but that cannot quite be
  retrieved
• People who can not come up with the word, but who
  thought they knew it, could identify the first
  letter, indicate the number of syllables, or
  approximate the words sounds

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1.The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

• Preconscious processing
• Blindsight
• Lesions in some areas of the visual cortex
• Patients claim to be blind
• When forced to guess about a stimulus in the
  blind region, they correctly guess locations
  and orientations of objects at above-chance
  levels

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1.The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

• 2. Controlled Versus Automatic Processes
• Controlled processes
• Require intentional effort full conscious
  awareness consume many attentional resources
  performed serially relatively slow
• Automatic Processes
• Little or no intention or effort occur outside
  of conscious awareness do not require a lot of
  attention, performed by parallel processing fast

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1.The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

• 2. Controlled Versus Automatic Processes
• Many tasks that start off as controlled processes
  eventually become automatic ones
• Automatization
• The process by which a procedure changes from
  being highly conscious to being relatively
  automatic

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?

• Can you provide some examples
• of automatic and controlled processes?

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1.The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

• 3. Habituation
• Habituation
• We become accustomed to a stimulus, we gradually
  notice it less and less (e.g. music and studying)
• Dishabituation
• A change in a familiar stimulus prompts us to
  start noticing the stimulus again
• Sensory adaptation
• Physiological phenomenon not subject to
  conscious control occurs directly in the sense
  organ, not in the brain

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2. Attention

• 1. Vigilance and Signal Detection
• We vigilantly try to detect whether we did or did
  not sense a signal (a particular target stimulus
  of interest)
• Vigilance
• A persons ability to attend to a field of
  stimulation over a prolonged period, during which
  the person seeks to detect the appearance of a
  particular target stimulus
• Example (Mackworth, 1948)
• Participants were watching when a clock hand took
  a double step
• Substantial deterioration after half an hour of
  observation
• Vigilance can be increased with training

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2. Attention

• 2. Search
• Search
• Scan the environment for particular features
• Whereas vigilance involves passively waiting for
  a signal stimulus to appear, search involves
  actively seeking out the target
• Distracters
• Nontarget stimuli that divert our attention away
  from the target stimuli
• Can cause false alarm

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2. Attention

• 2. Search
• 2 kinds of search
• Feature search
• When we can look for some distinctive features of
  a target we simply scan the environment for those
  features (e.g. T vs. O)
• Conjunction search
• We look for a particular combination of features
  (e.g. T vs. L, p. 85)

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2. Attention

• 2. Search
• Feature-Integration Theory (Anne Treisman)
• Each of us has mental map for representing the
  given set of features for a particular item
  (shape, size, color features)
• During feature searches we monitor the relevant
  feature map for the presence of any activation in
  the visual field
• During conjunction searches, we can simply use
  the map of features, we must conjoin two or more
  features into an object representation at a
  particular location

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2. Attention

• 2. Search
• Similarity theory (Duncan and Humphreys)
• As the similarity between target and distracter
  increases, so does the difficulty in detecting
  the target stimuli
• Factors influencing search
• Similarity between the target and the distracters
• Similarity among distracters (p. 86, 87)

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2. Attention

• 2. Search
• Guided search theory (Cave and Wolfe)
• All searches involve two consecutive stages
• Parallel stage simultaneous activation of all
  the potential targets
• Serial stage sequential evaluation of each of
  the activated elements
• Movement-Filter theory (McLeod at al.)
• Movement-filter can direct attention to stimuli
  with a common movement characteristics
• Movement can both enhance and inhibit visual
  search

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2. Attention

• 3. Selective Attention
• Stroop effect (Stroop, 1935)
• Demonstrates the psychological difficulty in
  selectively attending to the color of the ink and
  trying to ignore the word that is printed with
  the ink of that color
• Since reading is an automatic process (not
  readily subject to your conscious control) you
  find it difficult intentionally to refrain from
  reading and instead to concentrate on identifying
  the color of the ink

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2. Attention

• 3. Selective Attention
• The cocktail party problem (Cherry, 1953)
• The process of tracking one conversation in the
  face of the distraction of other conversations
• Shadowing
• Listening to two different messages and repeating
  back only one of the messages as soon as possible
  after you hear it
• Dichotic presentation
• Listening to two different messages (presenting a
  different message to each ear) and attending to
  only one of them

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2. Attention

• 3. Selective Attention
• Filter and Bottleneck Theories
• Broadbents Model
• We filter information right after it is
  registered at the sensory level
• Morays Selective Filter Model
• The selective filter blocks out most information
  at the sensory level, but some highly salient
  messages are so powerful that they burst through
  the filtering mechanism (e.g. your name)

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2. Attention

• 3. Selective Attention
• Filter an Bottleneck Theories (cont.)
• Treismans Attenuation Model
• We preattentively analyze the physical properties
  of a stimulus (stimuli with target properties)
• We analyze whether a given stimulus has a
  pattern, such as speech or music
• We sequentially evaluate the incoming messages,
  assigning appropriate meanings to the selected
  stimuli messages

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2. Attention

• 3. Selective Attention
• Filter and Bottleneck Theories (cont.)
• Deutsch and Deutschs Late Filter Model
• Placed the signal-blocking filter later in the
  process, after sensory analysis and also after
  some perceptual and conceptual analysis of input
  had taken place
• Neissers Synthesis
• Two processes governing attention
• Preattentive processes (rapid, automatic,
  parallel)
• Attentive processes (controlled, occur later,
  serial)

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2. Attention

• 3. Selective Attention
• Attentional-Resource Theories
• We have attentional resources specific to a given
  modality
• Explains why we can study and listen to a music
  but not listen to news

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2. Attention

• 4. Divided Attention
• The attentional system must perform two or more
  discrete tasks at the same time
• much better performance at two or more automatic
  tasks (driving a car and speaking) than
  controlled tasks (writing and comprehending read
  text)

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3. Cognitive Neuroscientific Approaches to
Attention

• Hemineglect (Martha Farah)
• Patients ignore half of their visual field
• Attention deficits have been linked to lesions in
  
• The frontal lobe
• The basal ganglia

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Stroop Effect

• Read through this list of color names as quickly
  as possible. Read from right to left across each
  line
• Red Yellow Blue Green
• Blue Red Green Yellow
• Yellow Green Red Blue

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Stroop Effect

• Name as quickly as possible the color of ink in
  which each word is printed. Name from left to
  right across each line.
• Red Blue Green Yellow
• Yellow Red Blue Green
• Blue Yellow Green Red