Attention Types: Divided, Selective, Inattentional Blindness

Attention Divided Attention, Selective Attention, Inattentional Blindness, & Change Blindness: Selected attention is when you choose to focus on one stimuli at a time Exogenous cues are those which are external to any goals we may have, meaning we don’t have to tell ourselves to look for them in order for them to capture our attention (i.e. you’re in a meeting and a loud noise catches your attention) → driven by bottom-up or external events, “pop-out” Endogenous cues are more internalized and higher ordered, meaning they involve internal knowledge in order to understand the cue in the first place and the intention to follow it (driven by top-down or internal events → cocktail party) Inattentional blindness is when we are not consciously aware of things that happen within our visual field when our attention is directed elsewhere (i.e. not knowing where the nearest fire extinguisher is in the building, even if you pass by it every day at work) Change blindness is when we fail to notice changes in the environment (i.e. the difference between a previous state and a current state, inattentional is when you miss something that is right in front of you) - - 1. 2. Theories of Selective Attention: Broadbent’s Early Selection Theory states that all information in the environment goes into our sensory register. It then goes to the “selective filter” where junk is removed and only important information reaches higher order brain regions for perception (i.e. assign meaning) Some issues with Broadbent’s theory is that if it were true, then we shouldn’t be able to hear our name in some other person’s conversation on the other side of the room Cocktail Party Effect shows that even if we are focused on our own conversation, if we hear our own name from across the room, we are able to often pick it up immediately even though we weren’t originally listening Deutsch & Deutsch’s Late Selection Theory moved the broad selective filter AFTER the perceptual process (i.e. giving it meaning) in order to account for the cocktail party effect The issue with this theory is that it seems a little wasteful to be assigning meaning to things you won’t ever really need Treisman’s Attenuation Theory is in the middle of the two previous theories, where this theory states that we have an “attenuator” as opposed to a “selective filter” that just weakens signals as opposed to getting rid of them altogether. If the lower priority stuff becomes important, then you will immediately switch over to that There is still much debate over which theory is correct The Spotlight Model of Attention & our Ability to Multitask: Spotlight model of attention states that we take in a ton of information from our 5 senses, but we don’t process all of it. We can only really ever focus on bits and pieces of information at a time Priming is the idea that exposure to one stimulus influence the response to another stimulus (i.e. hearing our name since we have been conditioned all our lives to respond to it) Resource model of attention states that we have limited resources with respect to attention These theories suggest that we are NOT good at multitasking because we have to completely shift our attention from one thing to another (i.e. texting and driving) Multitasking has a couple different components making it harder: Task similarity is when the two tasks are very similar, making it harder to do two tasks at the same time Task difficulty is when the task you are performing is difficult (i.e. driving and texting vs. driving and listening to music) 3. Practice is your previous exposure to a certain task, meaning it will be harder to multitask with new tasks as opposed to practiced ones Extra Notes: Covert Orienting is the act of focusing attention on an object or event without body or eye movement Overt orienting a person turns all or part of the body to alter or maximize the sensory impact of an event Attentional capture occurs when attention is attracted by the motion of an object or stimulus Neglect syndrome occurs when damage to the brain causes a change or loss in the capacity of the spatial dimension of divided attention Hawthorne effect is when an individual changes his/her behavior in response to being observed