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**Cognitive Psychology -- Chapter 4** **Attention and Consciousness** **Attention** - means by which we actively process a limited amount of information from the enormous amount available through our senses, stored memories, and other cognitive processes. - It includes both conscious...

**Cognitive Psychology -- Chapter 4** **Attention and Consciousness** **Attention** - means by which we actively process a limited amount of information from the enormous amount available through our senses, stored memories, and other cognitive processes. - It includes both conscious and unconscious processes. - Conscious processes are relatively easy to study. Unconscious processes are harder to study simply because you are not conscious of them. - allows us to use our limited mental resources judiciously. By dimming the lights on many stimuli from outside (sensations) and inside (thoughts and memories), we can highlight the stimuli that interest us. This heightened focus increases the likelihood that we can respond speedily and accurately to interesting stimuli.  **Consciousness** - includes both the feeling of awareness and the content of awareness, some of which may be under the focus of attention. **Three Purposes of Conscious Attention** 1. It helps monitor our interactions with the environment. - Through such monitoring, we maintain our awareness of how well we adapt to the situation in which we find ourselves. 2. It assists us in linking our past (memories) and our present (sensations) to give us a sense of continuity of experience. - Such continuity may even serve as the basis for personal identity. 3. It helps us control and plan our future actions. - We can do so based on the monitoring information and the links between past memories and present sensations. **Four Main Functions of Attention** 1. **Signal detection and vigilance** - try to detect the appearance of a particular stimulus. Air traffic controllers, for example, keep an eye on all traffic near and over the airport. 2. **Search** - try to find a signal amidst distracters, for example, when we are looking for our lost cell phone on an autumn leaf-filled hiking path. 3. **Selective attention** - Choose to attend to some stimuli and ignore others, such as when we are involved in a conversation at a party. 4. **Divided attention** - prudently allocate our available attentional resources to coordinate our performance of more than one task at a time, as when we are cooking and engaged in a phone conversation at the same time. **Signal Detection: Finding Important Stimuli in a Crowd** **Signal-detection theory (SDT)** - a framework to explain how people pick out the few important stimuli when they are embedded in a wealth of irrelevant, distracting stimuli. - used to measure sensitivity to a target's presence. For example, of the lifeguard, **First**, in **hits** (also called **"true positives"**), the lifeguard correctly identifies the presence of a target (i.e., somebody drowning). **Second**, in false alarms (also called **"false positives"**), he or she incorrectly identifies the presence of a target that is actually absent (i.e., the lifeguard thinks somebody is drowning who actually isn't). **Third**, in misses (also called **"false negatives"**), the lifeguard fails to observe the presence of a target (i.e., the lifeguard does not see the drowning person). **Fourth**, in correct rejections (also called **"true negatives"**), the lifeguard correctly identifies the absence of a target (i.e., nobody is drowning, and he or she knows that nobody is in trouble). Signal-detection theory can be discussed in the context of attention, perception, or memory: **attention**---paying enough attention to perceive objects that are there; **perception**---perceiving faint signals that may or may not be beyond your perceptual range (such as a very high-pitched tone); **memory**---indicating whether you have/have not been exposed to a stimulus before, such as whether the word "champagne" appeared on a list that was to be memorized. **Vigilance: Waiting to Detect a Signal** When you have to pay attention in order to detect a stimulus that can occur at any time over a long period of time, you need to be vigilant. **Vigilance** - refers to a person's ability to attend to a field of stimulation over a prolonged period, during which the person seeks to detect the appearance of a particular target stimulus of interest. **Search: Actively Looking** - refers to a scan of the environment for particular features---actively looking for something when you are not sure where it will appear. As with vigilance, when we are searching for something, we may respond by making false alarms. **Conjunction Search** - we look for a particular combination (conjunction--- joining together) of features. **Feature-Integration Theory** - explains the relative ease of conducting feature searches and the relative difficulty of conducting conjunction searches. - Consider Treisman's (1986) model of how our minds conduct visual searches. For each possible feature of a stimulus, each of us has a mental map for representing the given feature across the visual field. **Similarity Theory** - Treisman's data can be reinterpreted. In this view, the data are a result of the fact that as the similarity between target and distracter stimuli increases, so does the difficulty in detecting the target stimuli - For instance, one reason that it is easier to read long strings of text written in lowercase letters than text written in capital letters is that capital letters tend to be more similar to one another in appearance. **Guided Search Theory** - suggests that all searches, whether feature searches or conjunction searches, involve two consecutive stages. **Selective Attention** - Colin Cherry (1953, see also Bee & Micheyl, 2008) referred to this phenomenon as the cocktail party problem, the process of tracking one conversation in the face of the distraction of other conversations. **Theories of Selective Attention** - Note how dialectical processes influenced the development of subsequent theories. The theories described here belong to the group of filter and bottleneck theories. A filter blocks some of the information going through and thereby selects only a part of the total of information to pass through to the next stage. **Broadbent's Model** - According to one of the earliest theories of attention, we filter information right after we notice it at the sensory level (Broadbent, 1958; Figure 4.9). Multiple channels of sensory input reach an attentional filter. Those channels can be distinguished by their characteristics like loudness, pitch, or accent. The filter permits only one channel of sensory information to proceed and reach the processes of perception. We thereby assign meaning to our sensations. **Selective Filter Model** - Not long after Broadbent's theory, evidence began to suggest that Broadbent's model must be wrong (e.g., Gray & Wedderburn, 1960). Moray found that even when participants ignore most other high-level (e.g., semantic) aspects of an unattended message, they frequently still recognize their names in an unattended ear (Moray, 1959; Wood & Cowan, 1995). **Attenuation Model** - To explore why some unattended messages pass through the filter, Anne Treisman conducted some experiments. She had participants shadowing coherent messages, and at some point switched the remainder of the coherent message from the attended to the unattended ear. - Deutsch and Deutsch (1963; Norman, 1968) developed a model in which the location of the filter is even later (Figure 4.10). They suggested that stimuli are filtered out only after they have been analyzed for both their physical properties and their meaning. This later filtering would allow people to recognize information entering the unattended ear. For example, they might recognize the sound of their own names or a translation of attended input (for bilinguals). **A Synthesis of Early-Filter and Late-Filter Models** - Both early and late selection theories have data to support them. ** Preattentive processes:** - These automatic processes are rapid and occur in parallel. They can be used to notice only physical sensory characteristics of the unattended message. But they do not discern meaning or relationships. **Attentive, controlled processes:** - These processes occur later. They are executed serially and consume time and attentional resources, such as working memory. They also can be used to observe relationships among features. They serve to synthesize fragments into a mental representation of an object. **Divided Attention**  - Every time you are engaged in two or more tasks simultaneously, your attention is divided between those tasks. **Factors That Influence Our Ability to Pay Attention** - existing theoretical models of attention may be too simplistic and mechanistic to explain the complexities of attention. There are many other variables that have an impact on our ability to concentrate and pay attention. **Anxiety:** - Being anxious, either by nature (trait-based anxiety) or by situation (state-based anxiety), places constraints on attention. **Arousal:** - Your overall state of arousal affects attention as well. You may be tired, drowsy, or drugged, which may limit attention. Being excited sometimes enhances attention. **Task difficulty:** - If you are working on a task that is very difficult or novel for you, you'll need more attentional resources than when you work on an easy or highly familiar task. Task difficulty particularly influences performance during divided attention. ** Skills:** - The more practiced and skilled you are in performing a task, the more your attention is enhanced **Neuroscience and Attention: A Network Model** **Alerting:** - is defined as being prepared to attend to some incoming event, and maintaining this attention. Alerting also includes the process of getting to this state of preparedness. **Orienting:** - is defined as the selection of stimuli to attend to. This kind of attention is needed when we perform a visual search. You may be able to observe this process by means of a person's eye movements, but sometimes attention is covert and cannot be observed from the outside. The orienting network develops during the first year of life. **Executive Attention:** - includes processes for monitoring and resolving conflicts that arise among internal processes. These processes include thoughts, feelings, and responses. **Intelligence and Attention** - Attention also plays a role in intelligence. - One model of intelligence that takes attention into account is the Planning, Attention, and Simultaneous--Successive Process Model of Human Cognition (PASS; Das, Naglieri, & Kirby, 1994; see also Davidson & Kemp, 2010). Based on Luria's (1973) theory of intelligence, it assumes that intelligence consists of an assortment of functional units that are the basis for specific actions (Naglieri & Kaufman, 2001). According to the PASS model, there are three distinct processing units and each is associated with specific areas of the brain: arousal and attention, simultaneous and successive processing, and planning. **First unit, arousal and attention:** - is primarily attributed to the brainstem, diencephalon, and medial cortical regions of the brain. The researchers suggest that arousal is an essential antecedent to selective and divided attention. **Inspection Time** - the amount of time it takes you to inspect items and make a decision about them **Reaction Time** - Some investigators have proposed that intelligence can be understood in terms of speed of neuronal conduction (e.g., Jensen, 1979, 1998). In other words, the smart person is someone whose neural circuits conduct information rapidly. When Arthur Jensen proposed this notion, direct measures of neural-conduction velocity were not readily available. **When Our Attention Fails Us** - attention deficits have been linked to lesions in the frontal lobe and in the basal ganglia, visual attentional deficits have been linked to the posterior parietal cortex and the thalamus, as well as to areas of the midbrain related to eye movements. **Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)** - Most of us take for granted our ability to pay attention and to divide our attention in adaptive ways. But not everyone can do so. People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have difficulties in focusing their attention in ways that enable them to adapt in optimal ways to their environment Children with the inattentive type of ADHD show several distinctive symptoms: ** They are easily distracted by irrelevant sights and sounds.** ** They often fail to pay attention to details.** ** They are susceptible to making careless mistakes in their work.** ** They often fail to read instructions completely or carefully.** ** They are susceptible to forgetting or losing things they need for tasks, such as pencils or books.** ** They tend to jump from one incomplete task to another.** - Studies have shown that children with ADHD exhibit slower and more variable reaction times than their siblings who are not affected by the disorder. **Change Blindness and Inattentional Blindness** - Evolutionarily, our ability to spot predators as well as to detect food sources has been a great advantage for our survival. Adaptive behavior requires us to be attentive to changes in our environment because changes cue us to both opportunities and dangers. It thus may be surprising to discover that people can show remarkable levels of change blindness, an inability to detect changes in objects or scenes that are being viewed. **Spatial Neglect---One Half of the World Goes Amiss** - attentional dysfunction in which participants ignore the half of their visual field that is contralateral to (on the opposite side of) the hemisphere of the brain that has a lesion. It is a result mainly of unilateral lesions in the parietal and frontal lobes, most often in the right hemisphere. **Dealing with an Overwhelming World---Habituation and Adaptation** - Crossing a street, we need to see that suddenly there is a car racing around the corner and in our direction. When we interact with our family and friends, we want to be aware of changes in their emotions and behavior so we can respond to them adequately. And yet, if we responded to every little change and stimulus in our environment, we would be quickly and completely overwhelmed. **Habituation** - involves our becoming accustomed to a stimulus so that we gradually pay less and less attention to it. **Dishabituation** - change in a familiar stimulus prompts us to start noticing the stimulus again.  **Automatic and Controlled Processes in Attention** - our attention is capable of processing only so many things at once. There are attentional filters that filter out irrelevant stimuli to enable us to process in depth what is important to us. To help us navigate our environment more successfully, we automatize many processes so that we can execute them without using up resources that then can be spent on other processes. **Automatic and Controlled Processes** - writing your name involve no conscious control (Palmeri, 2003). For the most part, they are performed without conscious awareness. Nevertheless, you may be aware that you are performing them. They demand little or no effort or even intention. Multiple automatic processes may occur at once, or at least very quickly, and in no particular sequence. **Controlled processes** - accessible to conscious control and even require it. Such processes are performed serially, for example, when you want to compute the total cost of a trip you are about to book online. In other words, controlled processes occur sequentially, one step at a time. They take a relatively long time to execute, at least as compared with automatic processes.   **Consciousness** - Not everything we do, reason, and perceive is necessarily conscious. We may be unaware of stimuli that alter our perceptions and judgments or unable to come up with the right word in a sentence even though we know that we know the right word. **The Consciousness of Mental Processes** - No serious investigator of cognition believes that people have conscious access to very simple mental processes. For example, none of us has a good idea of the means by which we recognize whether a printed letter such as A is an uppercase or lowercase one. But now consider more complex processing. **Preconscious Processing** - Some information that currently is outside our conscious awareness still may be available to consciousness or at least to cognitive processes. For example, when you comb your hair while getting ready for a first date, you are still able to do the combing although your mind in all likelihood will be completely elsewhere, namely, on the date. The information about how to comb your hair is available to you even if you are not consciously combing. Information that is available for cognitive processing but that currently lies outside conscious awareness exists at the preconscious level of awareness. Preconscious information includes stored memories that we are not using at a given time but that we could summon when needed. **What's That Word Again? The Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon** - sometimes pulling preconscious information into conscious awareness is not easy. Most of you probably have experienced the tip-of-the-tongue Consciousness 179 phenomenon, in which you try to remember something that is stored in memory but that cannot readily be retrieved. - apparently universal. It is seen in speakers of many different languages. Bilingual people experience more tip-of-the-tongues than monolingual speakers which may be because bilinguals use either one of their languages less frequently than do monolinguals **When Blind People Can See** - Preconscious perception also has been observed in people who have lesions in some areas of the visual cortex (Rees, 2008; Ro & Rafal, 2006). Typically, the patients are blind in areas of the visual field that correspond to the lesioned areas of the cortex. Some of these patients, however, seem to show blindsight---traces of visual perceptual ability in blind areas (Kentridge, 2003). When forced to guess about a stimulus in the "blind" region, they correctly guess locations and orientations of objects at above-chance levels (Weiskrantz, 1994, 2009). **Key Themes** **Structures versus processes.** - The brain contains various structures and systems of structures, such as the reticular activating system, that generate the processes that contribute to attention. Sometimes, the relationship between structure and process is not entirely clear, and it is the job of cognitive psychologists to better understand it. **Validity of causal inferences versus ecological validity.** - For example, a study in which military officers are examining radar screens for possible attacks against the country must have a high degree of ecological validity to ensure that the results apply to the actual situation in which the military officers find themselves. The stakes are too high to allow slippage. Yet, when vigilance in the actual-life situation is studied, one cannot and would not want to make attacks against the country happen. Therefore, it is necessary to use simulations that are as realistic as possible. In this way, the ecological validity of conclusions drawn can be ensured. **Biological versus behavioral methods.** - Blindsight is a case of a curious and as yet poorly understood link. The biology does not appear to be there to generate the behavior. Another interesting example is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Physicians now have available a number of drugs that treat ADHD. These treatments enable children as well as adults to focus better on tasks that they need to get done. But the mechanisms by which the drugs work are still poorly understood. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, most of the drugs used to treat ADHD are stimulants, which, when given to children with ADHD, appear to calm them down. **Summary** 1. **Can we actively process information even if we are not aware of doing so? If so, what do we do, and how do we do it?** - Whereas attention embraces all the information that an individual is manipulating (a portion of the information available from memory, sensation, and other cognitive processes), consciousness comprises only the narrower range of information that the individual is aware of manipulating. Attention allows us to use our limited active cognitive resources (e.g., because of the limits of working memory) judiciously to respond quickly and accurately to interesting stimuli and to remember salient information. Conscious awareness allows us to monitor our interactions with the environment, to link our past and present experiences and thereby sense a continuous thread of experience, and to control and plan for future actions. We actively can process information at the preconscious level without being aware of doing so. For example, researchers have studied the phenomenon of priming, in which a given stimulus increases the likelihood that a subsequent related (or identical) stimulus will be readily processed (e.g., retrieval from long-term memory). In contrast, in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, another example of preconscious processing, retrieval of desired information from memory does not occur, despite an ability to retrieve related information. - Cognitive psychologists also observe distinctions in conscious versus preconscious attention by distinguishing between controlled and automatic processing in task performance. Controlled processes are relatively slow, sequential in nature, intentional (requiring effort), and under conscious control. Automatic processes are relatively fast, parallel in nature, and for the most part outside of conscious awareness. Actually, a continuum of processing appears to exist, from fully automatic to fully controlled processes. Two automatic processes that support our attentional system are habituation and dishabituation, which affect our responses to familiar versus novel stimuli. **2. What are some of the functions of attention?** **3. What are some theories cognitive psychologists have developed to explain attentional processes?** \- Some theories of attention involve an attentional filter or bottleneck, according to which information is selectively blocked out or attenuated as it passes from one level of processing to the next. Of the bottleneck theories, some suggest that the signal-blocking or signal-attenuating mechanism occurs just after sensation and prior to any perceptual processing; others propose a later mechanism after at least some perceptual processing has occurred. Attentional-resource theories offer an alternative way of explaining attention; according to these theories, people have a fixed amount of attentional resources (perhaps modulated by sensory modalities) that they allocate according to the perceived task requirements. Resource theories and bottleneck theories actually may be complementary. In addition to these general theories of attention, some task-specific theories (e.g., feature-integration theory, guided-search theory, and similarity theory) have attempted to explain search phenomena in particular. **4. What have cognitive psychologists learned about attention by studying the** **human brain?** \- Early neuropsychological research led to the discovery of feature detectors, and subsequent work has explored other aspects of feature detection and integration processes that may be involved in visual search. In addition, extensive research on attentional processes in the brain seems to suggest that the attentional system primarily involves two regions of the cortex, as well as the thalamus and some other subcortical structures; the attentional system also governs various specific processes that occur in many areas of the brain, particularly in the cerebral cortex. Attentional processes may result from heightened activation in some areas of the brain, inhibited activity in other areas of the brain, or perhaps some combination of activation and inhibition. Studies of responsivity to particular stimuli show that even when an individual is focused on a primary task and is not consciously aware of processing other stimuli, the brain of the individual automatically responds to infrequent, deviant stimuli (e.g., an odd tone). By using various approaches to the study of the brain (e.g., PET, ERP, lesion studies, and psychopharmacological studies), researchers are gaining insight into diverse aspects of the brain and are also able to use converging operations to begin to explain some of the phenomena they observe.