Divided Attention PDF

Reminders! • Second Student Article Presentation and Discussion THIS Friday • Submit reflections on Moodle Discussion Board by Thursday at 10 am • Everyone but presenters • Getting Started Worksheet due Friday • Quiz 3 on Friday • Coming soon: Exam 1 • Start reading Make It Stick! Divided Attent...

Reminders! • Second Student Article Presentation and Discussion THIS Friday • Submit reflections on Moodle Discussion Board by Thursday at 10 am • Everyone but presenters • Getting Started Worksheet due Friday • Quiz 3 on Friday • Coming soon: Exam 1 • Start reading Make It Stick! Divided Attention Can we (effectively) juggle two tasks at once? • Demonstration! • https://tinyurl.com/multitasking26 • Why is this an example of a divided attention task? What are some examples of this kind of divided attention in your everyday life? • Would this task be easier for people who do a lot of multitasking in their everyday lives? Why or why not? • Would people get better at this task with practice? Why or why not? Can we (effectively) juggle two tasks at once? • Trained attention hypothesis: Heavy multitasking may enhance some control processes (like task switching) because prolonged practice in processing multiple streams of information • Scattered attention hypothesis: Multitasking may impair cognitive control because it leads individuals to allocate their attentional resources too widely • More evidence in favor of the scattered attention hypothesis • Heavy media multitaskers are more distractable (Ophir et al., 2009) • Among heavy multitaskers, more activation in brain areas associated with attentional control during distraction (Ophir et al., 2009) Is social media stealing our attention? • 90% of young adults report regularly using social media (Perrin, 2015) • Belief attention can be focused on multiple tasks (social media, school work) with no negative consequences (e.g., Henderson et al., 2016) • Fear of technology isn’t new… • Socrates feared writing things down would have negative effects on memory • TV “dumbing down” the nation What’s the evidence? • Surprisingly little empirical evidence • Even less/no causal evidence • Problems: • Conflate internet use with social media use (Gonidis & Sharma, 2017) • Replication failures (e.g., Wiradhany & Nieuwenstein, 2017) What role does practice play? • Detecting ‘targets’ in rapidly presented frames • Divide attention between remembering target and visual search • Results • Early on: 55% accuracy • But after 900 (!) trials reached 90% accuracy • Participants said task became automatized after 600 trials Schneider & Shiffrin (1977), Exp 1 With substantial practice, participants became better at tasks requiring divided attention! But practice doesn’t always = perfect • Both target and distractors are letters • Found no significant gains in performance, even with substantial practice Automatic processing is not possible for difficult tasks Schneider & Shiffrin (1977), Exp 2 Divided Attention IRL Why is it so dangerous to be on the phone while driving? • Less effective visual scanning of the environment for potential threats • Impaired ability to predict where threats might occur Would we see similar effects if the driver is talking to someone in the car? Would listening to a podcast more closely resemble the cell phone or radio condition? Reflection! • Apply some of the attention concepts we’ve talked about to your own life as a student. Be sure to include at least one example from our discussion of selective attention and one example from our discussion of divided attention.