Jan 30 Attention 2

• Load Theory: Question of load
• Central resource capacity view: one resource pool from which all attention resources are allocated.
• Load in attended sense will determine distractor processing across all senses.
• Multiple resource capacity view: multiple resources from which attention resources are allocated.
• Attention depend on the match between relevant and irrelevant (distracting) information.
• Visual driving simulator task under two audio load conditions (from last class):

  • Low load: driving with no radio
  • High load: driving and listening to the radio
• Detect visual target was worse in high load condition.
• Listen to people speaking:

  • Low load: Determine if the words spoken in a loud or quiet voice
  • High load: Listen for bisyllabic words among mon– and tri-syllabic words
• Presented visual distractors; measured neural visual processing.
• Change blindness: The failure to detect changes in stimuli.
• Flicker technique paradigm: two similar visual images (e.g., scenes; A, A’) are presented with an interstimulus “mask” (I) across trials, small changes are made to the images (e.g., removal of window) and participants are asked if something changed between the images.
• Inattentional blindness: not noticing something new in your focus of attention.
• The presence of human faces slowed down attentional processes for the go/no go task because they capture attention.
• A Task Switching Task: Slower reaction time during switch trials compared to ‘non-switch’ repeat trials.
• Task Switching: Over a series of trials, participants perform blocks of tasks on the same input, sometimes switching between these tasks, with a decline in performance (reaction time, accuracy) after switching tasks, as the attentional system must be ‘re-set’ to engage the next task.
• Divided Attention: Task switching involves changing from working on one task to working on another task, using top-down processes to switch between mental sets associated with each task.
• Attentional Capture: Bottom-up cues are automatically processed, such as the sound of a car crashing, sirens, or seeing a mouse scurry in the corner of a room, it is about surprise or a prediction error, and happens to information that is important for survival, adaptive for this information to be automatically processed.
• Mental Sets: A method of organizing information based on the goals, a tendency in how you approach situations or solve a task, switching it requires attention.
• Feature-based attention is evident during visual search tasks.
• Eye movements detect visual attentional goals according to Embodied Theories of Attention.
• Divided attention is the ability to attend to more than one task, also known as multi-tasking, and is used in restaurant servers who take orders and collect payment.
• Overt visual attention is attending to something with your eye movements.
• Covert visual attention is attending to something without eye movements.
• There are two types of attention for visual search tasks:

  1. Pre-attention phase, where object features are separately coded
  2. Focused attention phase, where object features are integrated to guide a search.
• Sustained attention is the ability to focus on one task, often associated with vigilance or concentration, and is used in baggage scanners at the airport.
• Attention is needed to integrate features to perceive and find objects, demonstrating the interplay of perception and attention.
• In Conjunction Search, the search for an object that differs from distractors across many features, top-down attention (voluntary).
• The Pop Out Effect states that the time to find a target that is different by one feature from distractors is independent of the number of distractors (set size), and this effect is only for features processed automatically in the visual cortex.
• Posner’s (1980) Attentional Spotlight Theory: attention is about focusing on space and ignoring what is located ‘outside’ of the focused space.
• SOA (stimuli onset asynchrony): the time between the cue and target.
• Inhibition of return (IOR): attention is inhibited from going to a recently attended space after a long duration between space cue and target (SOA).