Types of Attention and Selective Attention

Attention Types

• Overt attention: Directly focusing attention through eye movements.
• Covert attention: Focusing attention without eye movement, e.g., pre-cueing.
• Endogenous attention: Attention driven by internal factors (e.g., your own goals).
• Exogenous attention: Attention driven by external stimuli in the environment.

Selective Attention

• Allows focusing on one message while ignoring others.
• Unattended stimuli may not reach the thalamus if attention is elsewhere.
• Cognitive demands affect attentional capacity.
• Dichotic listening: Presenting different auditory messages to each ear, requiring participants to repeat one while ignoring the other.
• Greater hemispheric activity for visual stimuli presented to the opposite visual field.

Attention and the Filter Model (Now Considered Incomplete)

• Early filter model: Stimuli -> Sensory Memory -> Filter -> Detector -> Memory. Sensory information is filtered early on.
• Unattended stimuli received little to no conscious awareness.
• However, phenomena like the "cocktail party effect" and "homophone priming" suggest some processing of unattended stimuli.

Attention and Neural Activity

• Motion-selective (MT) area activity is modulated by attention.
• Comparing activity when attending to moving dots vs. stationary dots.
• Similar observed in colour-selective area (V4).
• Suggests attentional mechanisms are fairly early in development.

Competition and Attention

• Biased competition: Directed attention acts as a top-down bias in sensory competition.
• There is no strict "early" or "late" filter for attention.
• Even ignored stimuli provoke some neural response.

Role of the Frontal Lobe

• Damage to the prefrontal cortex (PFC) reduces attentional effects on colour discrimination tasks.

Divided Attention

• Performance declines when multitasking.
• Difficulty may be underestimated.

Attention and Difficulty

• Attentional mechanisms may be suppressed when tasks are difficult.
• "Look but don't see" phenomenon describes instances of difficulty in processing stimuli despite visual engagement.

Explore the various types of attention including overt, covert, endogenous, and exogenous attention. This quiz covers selective attention mechanisms, the filter model, and the cognitive demands related to attentional capacity. Test your knowledge on how attention influences perception and information processing.