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Chapter 4:
Attention

Multiple Meanings of Attention

n

Attention
one of the most pervasive topics in cognitive
psychology and one of the thorniest
applies to a wide range of phenomena
n Input Attention
Alertness or arousal
Orienting reflex or response
Spotlight attention and research
n Controlled Attention
Selective attention
Mental resources and conscious processing
Supervisory attentional system

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Multiple Meanings of Attention

Four interrelated ideas
1. We are constantly confronted with more information
than we can attend to.
2. There are serious limitations in how much we can
attend to any at one time.
3. We can respond to some information and perform
some tasks with little if any attention.
4. With sufficient practice and knowledge, some tasks
become less demanding of attention.

Basics of Attention
n

Attention as mental process

The mental process of concentrating effort on a stimulus or
mental event.
mental mechanism by which we actively process information
in the sensory registers
drives the mental event of remembering, searching for
information stored in memory, and attempting to
comprehend

Attention as a limited resource

The limited, mental energy or resource that powers cognition.
a mental commodity, the stuff that gets focused when we
pay attention
can only attend to so many things at once
can only attend to something for so long

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First identification of the pattern relies almost exclusively on datadriven processing whereas later identification relies heavily on
conceptually-driven processing.

Alertness and Arousal

n

Input Attention:
The basic process of getting sensory information into cognition.

Vigilance / Sustained Attention:

Maintaining attention for infrequent events over a long period of
time (e.g., radar monitor).
Attention can degrade over time, causing a decline in
performance; 20 35 minutes
Improving vigilance in detecting a signal (e.g., plane on radar)
Make the signal longer
Make the signal more frequent
Make the background less busy

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Alertness and Arousal

n

Explicit Processing:
Involving conscious processing, conscious awareness that a task
is being performed, and usually conscious awareness of the
outcome of that performance.
Explicit memory: memory for information and for the moment
new information was encoded (e.g., reading a list of definitions)

Implicit Processing:
Processing in which there is no necessary involvement of
conscious awareness.
Implicit memory: memory for information without awareness,
not knowing when new information was encoded and not even
that it has been encoded.

Orienting Response & Attention Capture

n

Orienting Reflex/Orienting Response:

The reflexive redirection of attention that orients you toward the
unexpected stimulus.
Including physical redirection: body movement & eye gaze

Attention capture:
The spontaneous redirection of attention.
Mental aspect of redirection
Attention can be captured by changes in movement, abrupt
onsets, visual color, auditory pitch, etc.

Attention is typically directed toward significant, novel, or different

stimuli, but can also be directed by
Emotion
Social cues
Context

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Orienting Response & Attention Capture

n

Habituation:
A gradual reduction of the orienting response.
Allows attention to deal with constant, unchanging aspects of
the world.

Spotlight attention:
The mental attention-focusing mechanisms that prepares you to
encode stimulus information.
Posners study concluded that shifting attentional focus is a
thoroughly cognitive phenomenon, not tied to eye movements or
other overt behavior.
Process is rapid, automatic, and perceptual

Triesmans Visual search task: Search for a boldface T in each box.

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Search times when targets were of a specific color or

shape
n Conjunction condition: search for a blodfaced, capital T
n Disjunction condition: search for either a boldfaced letter or a capital T

Triesmans Visual Search Task

n

There was no increase in RT across the display sizes

(larger display meant more distractors) in the disjunction
search condition
Therefore, visual search for a dimension such as shape or color
occurs in parallel across the entire region of visual attention.

Search is largely automatic and represents very early

visual processing (before conscious awareness).

Conjunction conditions showed evidence of a slower,

deliberate attentional process, called controlled
attention.

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A Disorder of Attention: Hemineglect

n

Hemineglect:
A disruption or decreased ability to attend to something.
Typically found in the left visual field.
an attention disorder in which one half of the perceptual world is
neglected to some degree and is not attended to as completely
or as accurately as normal.
arises from an inability to disengage
attention, hence disrupting the process
of shifting attention to the opposite side

Controlled, Voluntary Attention

n

Controlled Attention:
Forms of processing with a deliberate, voluntary allocation of
mental effort or concentration.

Selective Attention:
The ability to attend to one source of information while ignoring
or excluding others.

Filtering or selecting:
Ignoring the many stimuli or events around so that only one
event can be focused on.
Ignored stimuli are distractions that must be eliminated or
excluded.
The mental process of eliminating those distractions is called
filtering or selecting.

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A brief note about Dual Task

n

Dual Task or Dual Message Procedure:

Two tasks or messages are presented such that one
task or message captures attention as much as
possible.
Purposefully overloading the sensory system to
handle more than it can process
A widely used Cognitive psychology research method
that lets us know how much attention a task
demands.

Treisman s Attenuation Theory

n

A series of studies exploring slippage

unattended information slipping past the filtering mechanism.

All incoming messages receive some low-level analysis,

including the analysis of the physical characteristics
rejected the early selection idea embodied in Broadbent s
theory.
When unattended messages yield no useful or important
information, they are attenuated; they are reduced in their
informational importance to ongoing processing.

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Selective Attention
n

Mind Wandering
Sometimes our selective attention wanders off track.
Mind wandering occurs when attention drifts off-task
to some other inappropriate line of thought.
e.g., getting to the bottom of the page and not knowing
what you just read

Can occur without awareness that a switch in

attention has happened
More likely to occur when:
A person is not fully engaged in a task.
There is mental capacity left over.
The person has other pressing personal concerns or anxieties

Selective Attention
n

Inhibition.
Actively suppress irrelevant information so that its activation
level is below baseline, remains below attentional awareness
This information then does not intrude on the current stream of
thought.

Negative Priming
Slower responding to a target when that target was a to-beignored item on the previous trial.
Reflects the operation of an active inhibition mechanism of
attention.

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Attention as a Mental Resource

n

Psychological Refractory Period or Attentional Blink:

A brief slow-down in mental processing due to having processed
another very recent event
Allocating attention to a stimulus decreases the amount of
attention available for a second stimulus

Automaticity:
Perceptual or cognitive processes that can occur without
conscious awareness or intention
Consume little if any of the available mental resources.
Criteria for automatic processing

The
The
The
The

process occurs without intention, without a conscious decision

mental process is not open to conscious awareness or introspection
process consumes few if any conscious resources
process operates very rapidly, usually with 1 s. (informal criterion)

Automatic and Conscious Processing Theories

n

Priming:
Mental activation of a concept by some means, or the spread of
that activation from one concept to another.
Reading the word eagle makes other related concepts
(wing, talon, beak, flying) more accessible in memory and
therefore more quickly attended to if presented (e.g., lexical
decision task)
The activation of target information by action of a previously
presented prime.

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A Synthesis for Attention and Automaticity

n

Attention is equivalent to mental capacity.

We can devote resources to only one demanding task
at a time or two less demanding tasks simultaneously,
as long as together they do not exceed the total
capacity available.
The more automatic a task, the more resources
available for other tasks.

The route to automaticity is practice & memory.

With repetition and overlearning comes the ability to
perform automatically what formerly needed
conscious processing.

Disadvantages of Automaticity
n

Automaticity is difficult to reverse

The effects of practice create an autonomous process that can
lead to errors of inattention.

Action Slips:
Unintended, often automatic, actions that are inappropriate for
the current situation.
e.g., getting off on the exit to get to work when you actually intended to go
somewhere else.

Distractions can cause someone to lapse into a more automatic

process.

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