Lecture 6 - Visual Attention

• Attention – what is it?

• Diversity of approaches

• What happens when we move our eyes to scan a

scene?

• Benefits of attention

• Physiology of attention

• What happens when we don’t attend

• Disorders of attention

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 Attention Defined

▪ What is attention? A process that results in selectively

processing some information over others
▪ When we look at an object we usually pay ‘attention’ to it.
▪ Concept first described by William James
▪ But, we can look at something without attending to it.
▪ We must somehow direct our attention to the things we want
to perceive.
• They are important to us
• We have limited capacity

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 Selective Attention

Why is selective attention necessary?

▪ There is so much information bombarding the sensory systems
at one time, that we need to selectively attend to make sense
of it.

▪ How do do we selectively attend?

• The structure of the retina helps this process: high detail vision is
in the fovea, so we have to direct the fovea to objects of interest to
see them clearly.
• Other objects, in the periphery are less clear, blurry.
• Also, the amount of information reaching the brain from the fovea
is much greater (cortical magnification).

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 Selective Attention

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 Selective Attention…

▪ In order to select targets from an image like the one on slide 4,

you make many scanning eye movements.
▪ Eye movements guide our eyes (fovea) to different parts of a
scene - scanning
• Overt attention involves looking directly at objects
• Covert attention is attention without moving the eyes.

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 Diversity of attention research

▪ There are many ways to study attention

▪ Three covered in your textbook include

• Dichotic listening
• Pre-cuing and spatial attention
• Visual search and feature integration

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 Dichotic listening

▪ Classic method used to study auditory attention and

selective listening
▪ Different stimuli are presented to the two ears
simultaneously
▪ Participant must repeat (or shadow) what they hear in one
ear

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 Dichotic listening

▪ Results show that the unattended message was

suppressed.
▪ People could not report characteristics of that message
(even if it’s the same word stated over and over)

▪ Broadbent proposed a simple model or flow diagram to

describe this process.

Similar to the cocktail party phenomenon…

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 Spatial attention: Posner’s pre-cue paradigm

▪ Spatial attention means

attending to a particular location
in space.
▪ Michael Posner and colleagues
asked if paying attention to a
location enhanced our response
to that region.
▪ They developed a pre-cueing
paradigm.
▪ Observers fixate on the cross,
first see the arrow and then
respond rapidly to the square.
▪ Both valid and invalid trials

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 Spatial attention: Posner’s pre-cue paradigm

▪ Results showed that people respond more quickly to where

there attention is directed.
▪ Supports the idea that attention is like a spotlight.

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 Attention and the binding problem

o Treisman and Schmidt (1982) used a visual search paradigm to study how we
attend to different features of the same object.
o The proposal is that one of the roles of attention is to help us group pieces of
an object or scene together.
o This is referred to as binding.
o It is necessary because the many areas are involved in processing all the
aspects of an object/scene.

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 The binding problem

▪ The fact that we perceive objects and events as unitary, or

part of the same thing, means that we have to group very
different sources of information (motion, colour, form,
sound, touch etc).
▪ This has been called the binding problem.
▪ Feature integration theory argues that attention has a major
role in solving the binding problem.
▪ According to Treisman and Gelade (1980) there is a
preattentive stage of processing in which the features are
separate.
▪ Focussing attention on objects causes the focussed attention
stage.

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 Feature integration theory

▪ Treisman argued that attention binds the information from the

what/where pathways to create uniform percepts.
▪ This is most important when there are many objects and the
scene is complex.

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 Illusory conjunctions

▪ There’s been considerable research on FIT by Treiseman

and others.
▪ Support has been provided by work on illusory conjunctions.
▪ These are features associated with one object that are
incorrectly associated with another.

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 Illusory conjunctions

o In Treisman and Schmidt’s study they used four shapes and two
numbers
o Briefly flashed. Observers reported the numbers and then the
shapes/colours.

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 Illusory conjunctions

▪ Observers mix up the properties of the shapes.

▪ They might report a red circle or large green triangle.
▪ This doesn’t happen if the observers attend to the shapes instead of
the numbers.

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 Visual search task

▪ Observers are asked to

search for a target among
distractors
▪ Must do this as rapidly and
accurately as possible.
▪ The number of distractors
is varied
▪ Difference between
automated (preattentive)
and conscious (attentive)
processing.

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 Scanning a scene with eye movements

▪ When we search a scene to find someone or something we are

making eye movements.
▪ Why? Because the fovea has better acuity than the periphery.
▪ We make eye movements to place areas of interest on the fovea.
▪ Saccades are small quick eye movements used to scan a visual
scene.
▪ Pauses between saccades are used to gather information, these
are call fixations.
▪ Where do we tend to fixate?
▪ This depends on the goals and knowledge of the observer and the
type of scene.

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 Eye movements - scanning a scene

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 How does the brain deal with eye-movements?

▪ Moving your eyes causes the image on the retina to become

smeared or blurred
▪ As we move our eyes from one location to another, the
image of the world moves on the retinae.
▪ But we do not perceive that movement or the smearing.
▪ Why?
▪ Corollary discharge theory has been proposed to explain
this.

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 Corollary Discharge theory

Movement perception depends on three signals

• Motor signal (MS) - signal sent to eyes to move eye muscles
• Corollary discharge signal (CDS) - split from the motor signal
• Image displacement signal (IDS) - movement of image stimulating
receptors across the retina

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 Corollary Discharge theory

▪ Movement is perceived when comparator receives input from:

• corollary discharge signal.
OR
• image displacement signal.
▪ Movement is not perceived when comparator receives input from both
the corollary discharge and image displacement signals at the same
time.
▪ The comparator tells alerts the system to the eye movement so it can
evaluate whether motion has occurred
▪ Corollary discharge also helps with the fact that with each eye
movement the retinal image changes (like a series of snapshots)
▪ It provides a predictive signal that allows us to shift attention before the
eye movement occurs.

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 Things that influence visual scanning

▪ Some areas of an image stand out because they have high

contrast, or colour or orientations.
▪ These regions have high stimulus salience.
▪ The work of Parkhurst et al. has shown people tend to fixate on
areas of high salience first.
▪ Over time, fixations are guided more by meaning.
▪ Saliency maps show fixations are related to such properties in the
initial scanning process.

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 Visual salience – saliency maps

Lighter colours in the map in (b) indicate areas of greater salience

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 Visual salience: attentional capture

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 Scene schemas

▪ Salience refers to aspects of the stimulus

▪ There are also internal or cognitive factors that influence
attention:

• Scene schemas
• Observer goals
• Task-related knowledge / demands
We can study this by looking at where people look in a scene…

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 Scene schemas

▪ Observer’s knowledge about the type of scene can influence

attention.
▪ Related to the concept of regularities discussed previously.
▪ Researchers have called this scene-specific prototyping scene
schema.

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 Stimuli used by Vo and
Henderson (2009).

Observers spent more

time looking at the printer
(in B) than at the pot (in A).

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Figure 6-6 p131
 Scene schema…

▪ As we interact with the world we learn to expect information

in specific locations.
▪ Shinoda and colleagues (2001) found that
• Observers noticed stop signs more when they were at
intersections
• 45% of observers’ fixations occurred close to intersections.

The effects of experience and expectation on attention are top-

down influences, while salience can be considered a bottom-up
influence.

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 Observer’s goals

▪ Another piece of evidence that attention is not only driven by

salience is the fact that it can be influenced by the
observer’s goals.
▪ Yarbus (1967) recorded subjects eye movements while they
viewed a painting “An Unexpected Visitor”.
▪ Observers were given different tasks, or goals, and the
experimenters recorded the effect this had on their eye
movements.

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 Observer’s goals…

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 Task Demands

▪ Recent technology allows us to measure eye movements in

‘natural’ environments.
▪ This makes it possible to determine fixations while people
perform tasks.
▪ For instance, researchers have found that task demands will
override saliency in guiding fixations.
▪ People tend not to fixate objects that are task irrelevant, and
fixations occur precede motor movements by a fraction of a
second.
▪ Scientists have found it is easier to predict where someone will
fixate than to predict the order of fixations.

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 Saliency vs. task demands

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 The benefits of attention

Attention speeds responses

▪ Experiment by Egly et al.

• Observer views two rectangles.
• Cue signals where target may appear.
• Task was to press button when target appeared.
• Results show:
• Fastest reaction time at targeted position
• “Enhancement” effect for non-target within the target
rectangle

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 Egly et al (1994) study

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 Benefits of attention

Attention influences appearance

▪ Carrasco et al (2004) showed that attention influences the

perceived contrast of gratings
▪ two gratings are presented on either side of fixation
▪ A cue appears first, followed by the gratings – observer
reports which one had the higher contrast.
▪ When the contrast is matched observers report the cued
target as having higher contrast.

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 Physiological of attention

▪ Using fMRI O’Craven (1999) assessed how attention

affects brain activity.

▪ O’Craven (1999) – Subject attended to the house or face

show that attending to the moving or stationary face caused
enhanced activity in the FFA

▪ attending to the moving or stationary house caused

enhanced activity in the PPA

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 O’Craven et al stimulus

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 Physiological of attention

▪ Datta and DeYoe (2009)

• Attention maps show directing attention to a specific area of
space activates a specific area of the brain.
▪ Womelsdorf (2006) – showed that attention can cause a
monkey’s receptive field to shift toward the place where the
attention is directed.

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 Attention Can influence physiological responses

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 Attention shifts receptive fields

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 What happens when we do not attend?

Before moving to the next slide please watch this video:

Inattention Video click here

Or go to this site http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

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 What Happens When We Don’t Attend?

Inattentional blindness - a stimulus is not perceived even

when the person is looking directly at it
• Experiment by Simons and Chabris (1999)
• Observers are shown short film of teams passing a
basketball.
• Task is to count number of passes.
• Either a woman with an umbrella or a person in gorilla suit
walks through the teams.
• 46% of observers fail to report the woman or gorilla.

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 Inattention blindness

▪ When demonstrating this video in the classroom, I have found

that, as reported by Simons and colleagues, only 50% of the
students see the Gorilla.

▪ This only works if you know nothing about the gorilla - and have
a difficult task. For instance “count the number of times the
white team passes the ball without bouncing it”. You can try this
on a group of friends…

The point to remember is that lack of focussed attention can

have serious effects on what you perceive!

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 Change blindness

▪ Rensink and his coworkers showed that if important

information that draws your attention to changes in a scene
is missing, it is very difficult to see the change.
▪ Motion is a major source of attention capture.
▪ By inserting blanks between the original and the changed
image, Rensink removed the motion transients at edges
that draw your attention.
▪ When the blanks are taken out, it is trivially easy to see the
change…

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 Change blindness

▪ The same phenomenon can be seen in films, between shots, when

the camera shifts from one scene to another.
▪ This is similar to adding the blank field.
▪ Even when observers are told that the changes will occur, and
predict they will notice the changes, only 11% did notice the
changes.
▪ Please take a minute and go to the website below to see a series of
change blindness images…

Click here or go to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh_9XFzbWV8

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 Distracted Driving

▪ Driving requires constant attention.

▪ The 100-car naturalistic driving study recorded people while
driving.
▪ 80% of crashes, and 67 % of near-crashes the driver was
inattentive 3 sec before the incident.
▪ Over 22% were related to cell-phone type activity

▪ Strayer and Johnston (2001) specifically studied cell phone

use and driving…
The same decrements in performance were seen with hands-
free devices

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 Distracted Driving (cont'd.)

Red lights missed Reaction time (breaking)

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 Distractions beyond driving

▪ From 2007 to 2019 cell phone ownership jumped from 4 to

98%.
▪ Gold et al (2015) found that students sent an average of 58
text messages per day
▪ Others report during a 15 min study session only 6 min
spent on task before being interrupted.
▪ Intermittent reinforcement is one likely explanation for
attention to phones (operant conditioning).
▪ Even when not interacting with phones, their presence can
impact cognitive functioning (working memory and
intelligence).

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 Distraction by smartphone

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 Disorders of attention

▪ Spatial neglect – neurological condition caused by damage to

parietal lobe.
▪ Patients with left hemisphere damage ignore the side of space
opposite to the damage.
• Draw only right side of an object when drawing from memory
• Find targets in an array only on the right side
• Place a mark far to the right when asked to find midpoint
▪ Also will eat only from right half of plate, shaving right side of face
etc.

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 Disorders of attention

o Spatial neglect also happens when reporting things from memory.

o However, when specifically asked to focus attention to objects in
the neglected region they can report what is there.
o This is a disorder attention, not vision

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 Disorders of attention

▪ Extinction is another phenomenon that can co-occur with neglect.

▪ When fixating a point, a light flashed on one side (say left) is
detected.
▪ But if another light is flashed at the same time on the opposite
side, they do not report seeing the left light any more.
▪ Suggests that the unawareness of stimuli on one side is due to
competition from the other side of the visual field.
▪ Attention is distracted by the ‘winning’ side
▪ Our conscious awareness is a combination of visual signals and
attention – lack of awareness can occur in non-brain-damaged
people but they are aware there is another ‘side’

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 Disorders of attention

▪ Extinction seems to depend on the

type of stimulus used
▪ The degree of extinction (% of
time detected) depends on the
salience of the stimulus.
▪ Spiders and happy faces are
harder to extinguish than neutral
stimuli.
▪ It is possible that this reflects very
rapid, subconscious, pre-attentive
processing

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 Next lecture: Chapter 7
Will be released following Midterm 1

Sections to omit:
Focusing attention by meditating (pages 142-143)
Infant attention (pages 143-145)

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