Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology

EH115001S

Lecture 4

Attention (Part 1)
Roberto Filippi
Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

Outline
First lecture Auditory Attention How do we select what to attend Early studies and theories Second Lecture Visual attention Recent findings and theoretical frameworks Attention and the brain

Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

What is attention?
Not easy to define Problem: Attention is not a single concept Closely linked to memory It encompasses a variety of psychological phenomena

Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

An everyday life example

You are walking in a high street You think you see a friend of yours entering a shop selling soap You enter the shop and keep looking for your friend You focus on all the people who can look like your friend (e.g., hair colour, type of dress, etc.)

Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

An everyday life example

The strong smell of soap is bothering you and distracts you from looking around In the meantime someone shouts in the street: thief! You dont think of your friend anymore Someone touches you on your shoulder: its your friend! You can have a drink together now!
Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

How many types of Attention?

Visual attention (your friend) Attention to smell (the soap) Attention to sound (someone shouting) Attention to touch (your friend again!) Attention to taste (nice coffee?) and you also paid attention to your own thinking!

Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

Selective Attention
In all these actions you integrated many processes You always selected what to attend (divided attention) However, your main goal was to find your friend This is defined as endogenous attention, controlled by you (top-down process) All the rest was interference exogenous attention, driven by perceptual stimuli (bottom-up process)
Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

History of Attention
William James (1890) first definition of attention:

It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought

Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

Attention is very limited

Early experiments:
1) Welford (1952) Two signals presented in rapid succession Subjects to make a speeded response to both Finding: Reaction time to second stimulus depends on the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between stimuli When second stimuli presented after very short time, RT is slower than when there is long SOA Welford called this phenomenon the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) Evidence of a Bottleneck: we can process a second stimulus when we complete processing the first
Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

Auditory Selective Attention

Early studies focused on auditory stimuli Why not visual stimuli? Can you guess?

Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

Dichotic Listening
Very popular experimental method
Subjects are presented with two SIMULTANEOUS messages Different message to each ear Instructed to focus on one ear (e.g., the right ear) and repeat aloud what they heard or answer questions on the information they heard Technical term: shadowing

So, they had to divide their attention

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Dichotic Listening

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The Cocktail Party effect

The dichotic listening paradigm mimics the Cocktail Party situation What is it?

How do we do that?

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Early findings
Broadbent (1952-54); Cherry (1953); Poulton (1953-56)
We can focus both on specific acoustical differences and physical location of the voice we want to attend Most effective cue was physical separation of location A listener can selectively attend a given stimulus and reject messages not possessing same characteristics Performance increased when subjects were prompted to which channel (ear) they had to focus on (Cherry, 1953) When asked whether they recalled in the non-attended ear, they had virtually no memory of this information (e.g., different language) However, they did notice if the speakers voice changed (e.g., from man to woman) or if there was a bleep or a tone
Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology
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The Filter Model

Broadbent (1958):
Perception has limited capacity, so selection occurs EARLY Unattended stimuli are IMMEDIATELY discarded Therefore NOT processed (a part from some basic features) The physical features of the input are the most effective cues for separating messages First example of conceptualising human performance in terms of Information Processing

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The Filter Model (Broadbent, 1958)

Incoming Stimuli

Extraction of Physical Properties

Extraction of Abstract Properties

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Problems with the Filter Model

The model explained findings at that time, but: The Shadowing paradigm presented methodological problems For example, participants were asked about the content of unattended stimuli, minutes after the presentation Do you see any problem with that?

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Indirect measures
Unattended processing could be measured indirectly The participant is never asked directly about the information they had to ignore How? 1) Physiological responses 2) Neural responses (next week)

Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

Indirect measures
Corteen & Dunn (1974)
Participant conditioned by pairing electric shock with certain words When they heard these words, they exhibit a galvanic skin response (GSR) These words produced physiological reactions even when masked among other neutral words Moreover, the presentation of these words, caused a decrease in performance How can we interpret these results?
Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

Early selection, Early attenuation or Late selection? Broadbents Filter theory is an example of Early selection (unattended messages are filtered out immediately) Corteen & Dunn (1974) and other studies (e.g., Mackay, 1970; Lewis, 1970) showed that the unattended message was indeed processed more deeply Two different theoretical responses: 1) Late selection 2) Early attenuation

Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

Late selection
All stimuli are processed until perception runs out of capacity (Deutsch & Deutsch, 1960) The Late Selection Model (Deutsch & Deutsch, 1960)

Extraction of All Properties

Availability for report, Short Term Memory

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Early attenuation
Perception has a limited capacity, but non-selected stimuli are attenuated and can reach attention, if relevant to the individual
(Treisman, 1960)

Attenuation Model (Treisman, 1960)

Incoming Stimuli

Extraction of Physical Properties

Extraction of Abstract Properties

Dashed lines show weaker input Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

Pros & Cons

Broadbents theory cannot account for all dichotic listening effects Late selection theory very rigid, no evidence that all information is processed to the full extent Treismans model is the most reasonable account, but doesnt really explain how attenuation occurs

Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

In summary
General agreement that attentional resources are limited in capacity. Do you remember? But general disagreement when unattended information is filtered out in the cognitive process However, Treismans Early attenuation hypothesis accomodates the psychological evidence The deep processing of unattended messages is not the rule, but the EXCEPTION Only specific stimuli (e.g., personally relevant) pass the filter and are processed (Treisman, 1960) What about visual attention? Well see it next week
Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

Lets think
How is attention relating to working memory?

Can you imagine a world without attention? How would it be? When does your attention get most disrupted What are your strategies to keep focus on something?
Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology

Reading
Martin, Carlson, Buskist (4th edition) Selective attention Driver, J. (2001). A selective review of selective attention research from the past century. British Journal of Psychology, 92, 53-78

Faculty of Science and Technology - Department of Psychology