Attention PDF

Reminders: Sign in to AttendanceRadar Quiz: Clarifications on Quiz policies: Quiz answers should be your own work – do not discuss answers with other students...

Reminders: Sign in to AttendanceRadar Quiz: Clarifications on Quiz policies: Quiz answers should be your own work – do not discuss answers with other students until after class You can look at the readings during the quiz if necessary You can take the quiz even if not in class (though you will not be marked present for attendance purposes) Lowest 4 quiz grades are dropped Announcements Midterm: (almost) all grades online now Median = 41/48 = 85% Contact your TA if you’d like to review questions Paper #2 proposal due Nov 7th No class Monday 11/4 Next class Wed 11/6 Attention Why do we need to “pay” attention? How does attention get directed? Theories of attention Bottleneck theories: ØParts of our mind have capacity limitations, and so we need to filter out most of the environment ØE.g. if our face-processing system only works on single faces, we need to select just one face at a time to attend to ØEarly vs. late selection theories ØDoes this filtering happen early on (in sensory systems) or can it occur later (e.g. filtering based on semantics)? Theories of attention Selection-for-action theories: ØProblem is not that mental capacity is too small, but that it is too large ØProcessing everything would lead to interference between them, and make it hard to respond appropriately to specific stimuli Theories of attention Feature Integration Theory ØWe need attention to bind together multiple features of a stimulus ØWithout attention, many features can make it into working memory but they are jumbled up Anne Treisman Feature Integration Theory 1 3 2 4 5 Treisman and Gelade, 1980 Feature Integration Theory 1 3 2 4 5 Treisman and Gelade, 1980 Feature Integration Theory 2 1 3 4 5 Treisman and Gelade, 1980 Feature Integration Theory Illusory conjunctions: for unattended shapes, people will report incorrect feature combinations (e.g. “large unfilled red circle”) Treisman & Schmidt, 1982 Filtering vs attenuation ØAnother major theory of Treisman’s: unattended features are not fully filtered out, just attenuated ØDichotic listening experiments Left ear Right ear Mice 3 5 Eat Cheese 4 ØSubjects report “Mice Eat Cheese” Gray & Wedderburn, 1960 Simons & Levin, 1998 Change blindness ØThe scope of our attention is very limited, even in real- world situations (not flashed images in the lab) ØWe dramatically overestimate how much information we are attending to in the world ØThis is a failure of our “meta-cognition” ØFor example, distracted driving is much more dangerous than it seems External attention ØWhat kinds of attentional “filters” can we use? ØModality-specific (visual vs. auditory) attention ØSpatial (visual or auditory) attention ØVisual feature attention (e.g. colors, shapes) ØVisual object attention (e.g. a familiar face) ØAuditory feature attention Green Needle Brainstorm Internal attention ØTask rules: takes time to mentally redirect attention to a new task ØLong-term memory: selecting relevant memories and attenuating related but irrelevant ones ØWorking memory: choosing which information to maintain and which to discard  Score on location- related details Attention to location improves De Soares et al., 2024 memory for location-related details Stimulus-driven vs goal-directed ØIn addition to being goal-directed (“top-down”), attention can also be pulled by stimulus features ØPosner cueing Stimulus-driven vs goal-directed ØIn addition to being goal-directed (“top-down”), attention can also be pulled by stimulus features ØPosner cueing ØHearing one’s own name can pull attention to the unattended ear during dichotic listening ØJiang et al: unconsciously present an erotic image on left or right side, then present a tilt judgement on left or right side Stimulus-driven vs goal-directed ØIn addition to being goal-directed (“top-down”), attention can also be pulled by stimulus features ØPosner cueing ØHearing one’s own name can pull attention to the unattended ear during dichotic listening ØJiang et al: unconsciously present an erotic image on left or right side, then present a tilt judgement on left or right side ØFor heterosexual observers, an image of the opposite sex pulled attention to that side of the screen, improving judgements on the tilt task if it was on the same side Attention and Consciousness ØIs attention of a thing necessary for consciousness of that thing? Or can unattended things enter our conscious awareness? ØIs attention sufficient for consciousness? Or do some attended things not enter our conscious awareness? ØCan attention change the character of conscious experience? Ø“Green needle” vs. “brainstorm”? Attention Schema Theory of Consciousness Michael Graziano ØWe can most effectively control a system if we have a mental model (schema) of how that system works ØE.g. for motor control we use a body schema, a simplified representation of our physical body ØTo effectively control our attention, we should have a model (schema) of our attentional system – this internal model of attention is consciousness ØPredicts that we can sometimes have attention without awareness (since our model is not perfect), and that attention is less well-controlled without awareness (since we cannot use our model in that case) Exploiting attention: Magic Exploiting attention: Magic  11 separate shots in 28 seconds! Attention Theory of Cinematic Continuity: editing provides cues to seamlessly transfer our attention across cuts Summary Competing theories of attention give different explanations about why attention is limited and the consequences of not paying attending Attention can be directed based on external stimuli or internal goals Attention is not synonymous with consciousness, but there are debates about their relationship