Attention Theories and Midterm Information

Quiz Policies

• Quiz answers must be original work; do not discuss answers with others before class.
• Students can consult readings during quizzes if needed.
• Students can take quizzes even if not in class, but won't receive attendance credit.
• The lowest four quiz grades will be dropped.

Midterm Information

• Midterm grades are available online.
• Median score: 41/48 = 85%.
• Students can contact their TA to review specific questions.
• Paper #2 proposal is due on November 7th.

Class Schedule

• No class on Monday, November 4th.
• Next class is on Wednesday, November 6th.

Attention: Introduction

• Questions raised:
  • Why is attention needed?
  • How is attention directed?

Attention Theories: Bottleneck

• Bottleneck Theories: Parts of the mind have limited capacity, requiring filtering of environmental information.
• Example: Face processing system only works on one face at a time; necessitates selective attention.
• Early vs. Late Selection Theories: Do filters occur early (sensory level) or later (semantic level)?

Attention Theories: Selection for Action

• Bottleneck isn't about small capacity, but large amounts of information.
• Processing everything causes confusion and poor response to specific stimuli.

Attention Theories: Feature Integration Theory

• Feature Integration Theory (Treisman): Attention is needed to combine features of a stimulus.
• Without attention, distinct features of a stimulus become jumbled in working memory.
• Anne Treisman is associated with this theory.
• Treisman and Gelade (1980) provide supporting visual examples. Showing how attention helps combine features that are combined in the mind. Illusory conjunctions (e.g., "large unfilled red circle") illustrate the need for focused attention.

Attention and Search Example

• Demonstrates a visual search task (finding a "dog" in a matrix of letters).

Attention: Finding a Snake

• A visual search task, highlighting how mental attention works on finding shapes amidst a similar pattern of objects.

Attention: Dichotic Listening

• Dichotic listening experiments (Gray & Wedderburn, 1960) demonstrate that unattended information is not fully filtered out, but attenuated.
• Participants report "Mice Eat Cheese" even when the stimuli from the right ear is attended too. That shows that the processing from the left ear is processed but not entirely dropped.

Attention and Change Blindness

• Change blindness (Simons & Levin, 1998): shows attention's limitations, as participants often don't notice significant changes in a visual scene.

Taxonomy of Attention: External

• A taxonomy (classification) divides attention into categories like features, spatial location, Sensory Modality and time points.

Attention: External (Different Types)

• Different categories of attention. Example: visual vs. auditory attention, spatial attention, visual feature attention (colors, shapes), visual object attention (familiar faces), auditory feature attention.

Taxonomy of Attention: Internal

• Internal attention is categorized into task rules, responses, working memory and long-term memory.

Attending Internally

• Task rules: time taken to redirect attention to new tasks.
• Long-term memory: selecting relevant memories, lessening the influence of irrelevant ones.
• Working memory: choosing what to keep and discard from memories.

Attention: Priming and Memory

• Location priming leads to enhanced memory of location-related details (De Soares et al., 2024).

Stimulus-driven vs. Goal-directed Attention

• Attention is both goal-driven and stimulus-driven.
• Posner cueing demonstrates stimulus-driven attention.
• Other examples (e.g., hearing your name during divided attention tasks like dictotic listening), unconscious presentation of erotic images that affect later tasks (e.g., a tilt judgement, which can affect responses). These show attention being drawn by stimuli rather than deliberate choices (e.g., a goal-directed attention).

Attention and Consciousness

• Attention isn't the same as consciousness, but there's a relationship debated between them
• Is attention necessary for conscious awareness?
• Can attention change the character of conscious experience (e.g., "green needle" vs. "brainstorm")?

Attention Schema Theory

• Attention schema theory (Graziano): Effective control of attention relies on an internal model (schema).
• Attention can exist without awareness if the internal model is not perfect, so the actions are less controlled and predictable.

Exploiting Attention: Magic

• Examples demonstrating how magicians use attentional limitations to gain advantage.

Attention Theory of Cinematic Continuity

• Editing techniques facilitate attentional shifts across cuts in movies.

Summarizing Attention

• Different theories explain attention limitations but disagree on the causes.
• Attention is influenced by external or internal factors
• There is debate about whether attention correlates identically with consciousness.