Test Your Knowledge on Attention and Its Role in Psychological Processes

Psychological Process of Selectively Eating and Discrete Aspects of Information

• Attention is the concentration of awareness on a phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli.

• Attention is the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources and is manifested by an attentional bottleneck.

• Attention is a crucial area of investigation in education, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsychology.

• Selective attention is researched through sophisticated experimental paradigms from cognitive psychology and brain imaging techniques.

• Visual attention operates as a two-stage process: uniform distribution over the external visual scene, and concentration on a specific area of the visual scene.

• Two models describe how visual attention operates: the spotlight model and the zoom-lens model.

• Neuropsychology defines the working brain as being represented by three co-active processes: Attention, Memory, and Activation.

• Multitasking involves attempting to perform two or more tasks simultaneously, leading to slower performance and more mistakes.

• Simultaneous attention is demonstrated through Indigenous communities, where children learn through attending to their surroundings.

• Attention may be differentiated into "overt" versus "covert" orienting.

• Overt orienting is the act of selectively attending to an item or location over others by moving the eyes in that direction.

• Covert orienting is the act of mentally shifting one's focus without moving one's eyes.Overview of Attention and its Orienting Processes

• Attention can be controlled through external (exogenous) or internal (endogenous) processes.

• Exogenous orienting is considered to be reflexive and automatic and is caused by a sudden change in the periphery.

• Endogenous orienting occurs when attention is oriented according to an observer's goals or desires.

• Endogenous cues must be processed by the observer and acted upon purposefully; they are frequently referred to as central cues.

• Exogenous cues are typically presented in the periphery and are referred to as peripheral cues.

• Bottom-up processing is driven by the properties of the objects themselves and involves parietal and temporal cortices, as well as the brainstem.

• Top-down processing is under the control of the person who is attending and is mediated primarily by the frontal cortex and basal ganglia.

• The perceptual load theory states that there are two mechanisms that affect attention: cognitive and perceptual.

• Attention is a very basic function that is often a precursor to all other neurological/cognitive functions.

• Children develop patterns of attention related to the cultural practices of their families, communities, and the institutions in which they participate.

• Hemispatial neglect often occurs when people have damage to their right hemisphere.

• Social attention operates at two polarizing states: attending-to-self and attending-to-others.

• There are two types of distracting factors affecting focus: sensory and emotional.History of Attention Studies

• Inattentional blindness refers to the phenomena where people miss other stimuli that are present when they are focused on specific stimuli.

• Change blindness is the difficulty detecting changes from scene to scene due to intense focus on one thing or lack of attention overall.

• Attention was first introduced by philosopher Nicolas Malebranche who believed that attention is crucial to understanding and keeping thoughts organized.

• Wilhelm Wundt introduced the study of attention to psychology and measured mental processing speed using mental chronometry.

• The subtractive method was formalized by Franciscus Donders which measures the time difference between stimulus discrimination and response initiation.

• Hermann von Helmholtz stated that it is possible to focus on one stimulus and still perceive or ignore others.

• William James differentiated between sensorial attention and intellectual attention and immediate or derived attention.

• During the behaviorism era, Jersild published important work on "Mental Set and Shift".

• In 1935, John Ridley Stroop developed the Stroop Task which elicited the Stroop Effect.

• Modern research on attention began with the analysis of the "cocktail party problem" by Colin Cherry in 1953.

• Broadbent's Filter Model of Attention states that information is held in a pre-attentive temporary store, and only sensory events that have some physical feature in common are selected to pass into the limited capacity processing system.

• The early-selection vs. late-selection models debate was resolved by Lavie's perceptual load theory.