Cognitive Psychology: Attention and Automaticity

Defining Attention: Perspectives and Theories in Psychology

• Titchener (1908) viewed attention as central to psychological theory, reflecting broader approaches to understanding the mind and behavior. Attention influences perception, memory, and action. He saw it as foundational to studying human cognition and mental faculties.
• William James (1890) defined attention as the mind's focus on things clearly and vividly, implying a withdrawal from some things to effectively deal with others. Attention is selective, prioritizing relevant stimuli while filtering distractions. This involves cognitive prioritization in a given moment.
• J.B. Watson (1919) critiqued the vagueness of attention concepts, advocating for a focus on observable behavior instead of mental processes, thereby pushing attention research into temporary reduction.
• Treisman (1964) proposed the attenuation model, suggesting unattended stimuli are weakened rather than completely filtered, as in earlier models. This was significant to redefine attention research by linking it to measurable operations like filtering and selection.

Behaviorist View

• Behaviorists concentrated on observable behaviors, avoiding subjective concepts. For example, Watson might study how stimulus cues guide observable behavior rather than the internal mental process of attention.
• This perspective led to a temporary decline in attention research in the early 20th century but later research from the mid-20th century with cognitive revolution revived new methodologies and models.

Treisman's Model

• Treisman noted that previous definitions of attention as "focalization of consciousness" were too vague for empirical research, leading to inconclusive debates.
• Through advances in information processing theory and neuropsychological studies, attention research was revived.

Shiffrin's Model

• Shiffrin (1988) offered a broad definition of attention that includes managing limited processing capacity.
• Attention includes all aspects of cognition involving control and resource allocation.

The Cognitive View

• Cognitive psychology returned to studying internal mental processes in the 1950s and 1960s.
• This shift was influenced by advances in communication theory and cybernetics.
• The mind was conceptualized as a computer-like system.
• Key concepts like buffer store, selective filter, and limited processing capacity helped model and explain our mental processes, including attention.

Attention and Will

• Voluntary attention is a deliberate focus on a task or stimulus often guided by goals or instructions. Example: studying for an exam.
• Involuntary, or automatic attention, is when attention is grabbed or captured by an external stimulus without conscious effort, for example, a loud noise or a flashing light.
• Dual-process theories describe both voluntary and involuntary attention, balancing goal-directed attention and responsiveness to environmental stimuli to understand multitasking, and automaticity.

Selective Attention

• Selective attention is the ability to focus on one stimulus while ignoring others.
• The "cocktail party effect" illustrates that our attention can be drawn by salient information from the unattended channel (e.g., hearing your name in a crowded room).

Information Processing and Uncertainty

• Information was conceptualized as something that reduces uncertainty. For example, tossing a coin vs. seeing heads.
• Information theory quantifies information in terms of uncertainty reduction.

Problems with Attention

• Defining attention in a unified, consistent way is challenging given the diverse ways it's been defined.
• Understanding how and why certain stimuli are selected or prioritized poses another challenge.
• The homunculus problem, as implied in some attention theories, explains the problem of a self-directed agent controlling attention (a "little person") if not understood. This problem suggests that attention needs to be understood as an emergent property of brain networks rather than a central controller.

The Cognitive Perspective: The Second World War Influence

• During World War II, practical problems with multitasking and information processing highlighted the limitations of human attention.
• Research was motivated to study attention and human performance in real-world contexts.
• Realizations that humans have limited processing capacity and cognitive overload, led to new research direction and understanding of scientific attentional processes.

Welford and SOA (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony)

• Welford (1952) investigated how people responded to two stimuli presented in quick succession, measuring the time between stimuli, called SOA.
• Results show how processing speed changes with the interval between the stimuli, highlighting the concept of a processing bottleneck and time limitations in the brain.

Psychological Refractory Period (PRP)

• PRP refers to the delay in response to a second stimulus when two tasks are close in time.
• Example: pressing a button for a light and immediately identifying a sound.
• PRP demonstrations limit our processing capability, suggesting that our central processing systems cannot handle multiple tasks simultaneously.

Dichotic Listening: Early Experiments

• Cherry's shadowing task (1953) presented different messages to each ear, and participants were asked to repeat one message aloud.
• Results suggested a filter-like process separating attended and ignored information. Results challenge and support the concept of an attentional filter.
• Split-span tasks, where individuals heard digits in pairs from separate ears, showed ear-by-ear processing as in one ear before the other, supporting that the processing of one channel occurs before the other. The order of data input heavily impacts the process.

Broadbent's Filter Theory (1958)

• Broadbent proposed a model of attention as a filter that selectively processes information based on physical characteristics like pitch or location.
• This model was simplified but helped understand basic attentional processes, implying that attention acts as a filter to select important stimuli.

Treisman and Attenuation Model

• Treisman's theory extended Broadbent's model by proposing an attenuator that weakens rather than completely blocking unattended information.
• High-priority stimuli will get through even when attenuated, supporting the idea that meaningful information can sometimes break through or filter into consciousness.

Deutsch & Deutsch Model (Late Selection Theory)

• This model proposed that the brain processes all sensory inputs fully before later selecting relevant inputs for further processing.
• This stands in contrast to the early selection model which suggests that unattended information is discarded or blocked before full perception.
• The brain, instead of discarding everything it cannot process, processes everything and prioritizes the more salient information at a higher level.

Sperling's Experiments

• Sperling's experiments explored the capacity and duration of visual sensory memory (iconic memory).
• Results indicated that a large amount of visual information is briefly held, but only a small portion is transferred to working memory without selective attention.
• Partial-report method showed greater accuracy than in the full report method when recalling visual information.

Unattended Information

• Corteen and Wood's (1972) experiments showed that even seemingly unattended stimuli, if previously associated with something significant (like a shock), can still elicit physiological responses.
• This suggests that unattended information can still be processed unconsciously, challenging the idea that only attended information is processed.

Selective Filtering of Stimuli

• Eriksen & Eriksen (1974) examined how irrelevant (flankers) stimuli, competing with a target stimulus, affect selective attention.
• Results showed that interference in identifying a target increased when competing stimuli matched the target category. This supports that surrounding stimuli (flankers) compete for attentional resources and demonstrates that attention needs to filter out irrelevant stimuli.

Perceptual Load and Working Memory

• Perceptual load theory (Lavie, 1995) connects perceptual demands to distraction.
• High perceptual load leads to less distraction, while low load makes the processing less precise and leads to more distraction. The brain uses working memory resources to help process irrelevant stimuli.

Neural Bases of Visual Attention

• The posterior system is responsible for overt and covert (without moving eyes) attentional orientation, including the parietal lobe and superior colliculus.
• The anterior system (including prefrontal cortex) is crucial for higher-level decision-making, and goal-directed sustained attention.

Hemispheric Specialization and Visual Neglect

• The two hemispheres have specialized roles in attention, with the right hemisphere dominating spatial attention and the left hemisphere focusing more on details and language.
• Damage to these areas can cause deficits like visual neglect or ignoring some parts of the visual field.

Feature Integration Theory

• Treisman's theory explains how the brain combines basic visual features (e.g., color, shape) to recognize complex objects.
• Attention plays a critical role in binding these features together into a coherent percept.
• When attention is divided or lacking, miscombinations of features result in illusory conjunctions.

Attentional Dyslexia

• Attentional dyslexia is a reading disorder with attentional deficits, where individuals struggle to correctly integrate letters presented visually.
• The brain may fail to correctly bind features of letters and this leads to mis-identification or substitution.

Kahneman's Central Capacity Model

• Kahneman's model describes attention as a limited pool of resources that must be divided among tasks simultaneously.
• Different tasks demand different resources and can cause interference.
• This model shows how the demands of multiple competing tasks reduce cognitive efficiency and can affect performance.

The Supervisory Attentional System (SAS)

• The SAS is a higher-order cognitive system that monitors and resolves conflicts between competing action schemas.
• The SAS oversees automatic actions to direct goal-oriented attentional processes.
• The SAS is engaged when novel situations, conflicts, or complex tasks require more conscious control.

Multiple Resource Model (MMR)

• This model suggests that attention involves multiple, independent resources, each specialized for different types of processing (e.g., auditory versus visual).
• Different tasks that draw from different resources interfere less than tasks that share the same resources; this explains how efficient multitasking and multiple tasks can be done without cognitive overload.

Explore the fundamental concepts of attention and automaticity in cognitive psychology. This quiz delves into high-skilled tasks, dual-task situations, and the functioning of the Attention for Action model. Test your knowledge with questions regarding the Posner's Spatial Cueing Task and more.