PSGY1010 Cognitive Psychology 1 - Attention 1 PDF

PSGY1010 Cognitive Psychology 1 Attention I: Introduction to Modern Attention Research Dr Chung Kai Li [email protected]  Attention is goal-directed ▪ Attention is deployed to achieve something. ▪ E.g., finding someone in a crowd ▪ Having an awareness that attention is goal-dir...

PSGY1010 Cognitive Psychology 1 Attention I: Introduction to Modern Attention Research Dr Chung Kai Li [email protected]  Attention is goal-directed ▪ Attention is deployed to achieve something. ▪ E.g., finding someone in a crowd ▪ Having an awareness that attention is goal-directed can be very useful in learning how to manage attention. ▪ E.g., in a lecture setting, attention can often be managed by deciding specific goals for the lecture. 2  Attention varies in effort ▪ Deploying attention can be very easy, or it can be more difficult, ▪ E.g., during visual search. ▪ An example of Pop-out Search: 3 Where’s Wally – An example of Serial Search 4  Attention can be shifted ▪ The spotlight metaphor ▪ E.g., scanning from left to right ▪ In visual search attention and eye movements are often coupled ▪ But not necessarily: you can shift your attention without moving your eyes 5  Attention can be zoomed ▪ The zoom lens metaphor: closer inspection of candidate area 6  Attention is selective ▪ Metaphor: attention as a filter ▪ E.g., decide to focus on one conversation at a party, while ignoring another ▪ Attending to one thing means not attending to other things ▪ Early modern attention research is dominated by the filter metaphor 7  Other characteristics of attention Attention is limited ▪ Metaphor: attention as a resource ▪ E.g., trying to listen to two people at the same time ▪ You have a limited “amount of attention” and you can “run out of” attention 8  Attention can be captured ▪ You control your attention, but only to a degree. ▪ E.g., search for your friend with red hair, who never sits in first row ▪ Research has shown that attention still captured by other red- haired students in first row 9  Attention can be divided ▪ E.g., between modalities ▪ On this slide you will be dividing your attention between looking at the graph and listening to what I’m saying 10  ▪ Relevant for the exam: Eysenck & Keane Attention lectures ▪ Lecture 1: Introduction to modern attention research (from the 50’s and 60’s) ▪ Lecture 2: Early and late selection (more recent research) ▪ Lecture 3: Limits of attention (change Chapter 5 (pp.178-200) blindness, inattentional blindness)  Today’s lecture Learning objectives: ▪ Outline basic characteristics of attention ▪ Know classic experimental paradigms: Broadbent (1952), Cherry (1953) ▪ Describe Broadbent’s filter theory (1958) ▪ Explain early selection, understand evidence against early selection, and appraise alternatives to early selection 12  Classic studies Modern attention research ▪ Started in the 1950s ▪ Why “modern”? ▪ Follows a paradigm shift from behaviourism to cognitivism: “cognitive revolution” ▪ A good book on its history: Gardner, The mind’s new science ▪ One of the founding fathers is Donald Broadbent (1926-1993) 13  Air traffic control ▪ Air traffic control is very attention-demanding ▪ Often involves multiple pilots speaking at the same time 14  Broadbent (1952) Broadbent wanted to know: ▪ Task: Participants heard 2 Can we understand two simultaneous questions: simultaneous messages? ▪ “S-1 from G.D.O. Is there a heart on Position 1?” ▪ “S-2 from G.D.O. Is there a cross on Position 4?” ▪ Various conditions; e.g., answer question for S-1, but ignore S-2 15  Demonstration of task used by Broadbent ▪ Structure of example sentences: «’call-sign’, go to ‘colour’ ‘number’ now» ▪ call-sign is always ‘Baron’ ▪ Possible colours are blue, red, white, green ▪ Possible numbers are 1 to 8 ▪ Example: «Baron, go to white 2 now.» ▪ There are two speakers talking concurrently in each example with no spatial separation of the speakers 16  Broadbent (1952) ▪ Results: ▪ Only about 50% of the questions were answered correctly ▪ The task was very difficult, even with a limited number of possible alternatives 17  Cherry (1953) The cocktail-party problem ▪ “How do we recognize what one person is saying when others are speaking at the same time?” ▪ Condition 1: Two messages by the same speaker played to both ears (i.e., you hear both messages in both ears) ▪ Instruction: repeat one message and ignore the other (referred to as shadowing) ▪ Result: task is very difficult, but possible after many repetitions ▪ But Cherry only tested one participant. 18  Cherry (1953) ▪ Condition 2: Two messages by the same speaker simultaneously played to different ears → dichotic listening ▪ Participants are instructed to shadow one speaker 19  Demonstration ▪ Stimuli from the previous set, but with spatial separation 20  Cherry (1953) ▪ Result: much easier to be able to attend to one ear ▪ But what happens to the irrelevant message? ▪ No words or semantic content reported ▪ Change in language not noticed ▪ Reversed speech sometimes recognised ▪ Change from male to female or to pure tone recognised ▪ Basic physical stimulus characteristics are processed 21  Conclusions from these experiments ▪ It is very hard to attend to two messages that are not separable by physical cues (i.e., same speaker, same ear) ▪ With physical cues (e.g., location of the speaker) it is much easier ▪ We can attend to one message and know very little about the other one 22 Broadbent’s filter theory 23 Broadbent's filter theory – from perception to processing 24 The short-term memory store ▪ Information from multiple sensory inputs enters a short-term memory store ▪ Current terms for short-term store: ▪ Sensory register/buffer ▪ Immediate memory ▪ Iconic/echoic memory ▪ Simple physical stimulus properties (e.g., location, pitch, intensity) are processed in parallel 25  The selective filter ▪ A selective filter identifies information for further processing ▪ The filter uses physical stimulus properties as the basis for selection 26  The limited capacity channel ▪ The limited capacity channel is a serial processor ▪ It can only process one thing at a time, therefore other things must wait! ▪ Current term: focus of attention in working memory 27  Summary of Broadband’s model ▪ Unattended information does not pass the filter ▪ Selection/filtering occurs before… (all terms below mean the same thing!) ▪ stimuli are identified ▪ stimuli are recognised ▪ stimuli are fully analysed ▪ stimulus meaning is analysed ▪ This means that Broadbent’s filter theory is an early selection theory 28  Early selection in Broadband’s model ▪ Selective filtering takes place before full meaning analysis can occur in the limited capacity channel. 29  Interim summary ▪ There are (at least) two channels of information, for example: ▪ Message to right ear vs. left ear ▪ Message from speaker 1 vs. speaker 2 ▪ Centre of screen vs. to the side ▪ Participants hear one relevant instruction and the other is irrelevant ▪ Early selection models assume that the relevant channel is attended, and the irrelevant channel is not attended ▪ As a result of attention: ▪ Irrelevant information is filtered out based on basic physical stimulus properties ▪ Relevant information is selected and further analysed 30  Evidence against early selection Own-name effect ▪ Moray (1959; also Wood & Cowan, 1995) ▪ About 1/3 of participants noticed own name when it was presented to irrelevant ear ▪ This suggests that the presumably unattended information was analysed which is not consistent with early selection theory 31  Message switching Treisman (1960) ▪ Participants report information from irrelevant ear when the message switches from one ear to the other ▪ Message to shadowed ear: In the picnic basket she had peanut butter, book, leaf, root, sample, always ▪ Message to unshadowed ear: cat, large, day, apple, friend, every, select, sandwiches and chocolate brownies ▪ Participant will repeat: In the picnic basket she had peanut butter, sandwiches and chocolate brownies. ▪ Again: meaning of presumably unattended information was analysed → not consistent with early selection theory 32  Conditioning with electric shocks ▪ Phase 1: words paired with electric shocks ▪ Phase 2: words presented to irrelevant ear ▪ Result: words affect skin conductance responses (Corteen & Wood, 1972; Corteen & Dunn, 1974; Forster & Govier, 1978) ▪ This is not consistent with early selection theory ▪ Early selection theory seemed incorrect: search for alternatives 33  Alternatives to early selection Alternatives to Broadbent’s filter theory ▪ Attenuation theory – developed by Anne Treisman (1935-2018) ▪ Late Selection Theory 34  Alternative 1: Attenuation theory ▪ Filter not completely selective (Treisman, 1960, 1964) ▪ This provides explanation for failures of early selection: ▪ Some concepts in “mental dictionary” more readily available (e.g., our own names) ▪ Relatively weak signal sufficient to activate these concepts 35  Alternative 2: Late selection Deutsch & Deutsch (1963) ▪ Meaning is analysed before input is filter ▪ Two central assumptions about the processing of perceptual input: ▪ It is automatic (not under voluntary control) ▪ It is not capacity-limited (everything is fully analysed) ▪ However, there is very good evidence that these central assumptions are wrong when taken together 36  Summary ▪ There is good evidence that early selection can occur, and the meaning of irrelevant information is usually not processed ▪ But this is not always the case. Sometimes meaning of irrelevant information is processed ▪ Next time we will explore why irrelevant information is sometimes processed. 37 Thank you for your attention! Any questions?