Attention and Consciousness

• ATTENTION


  actively process a limited amount of information from enormous amounts of information available through our senses, stored memories, and other cognitive processes.
• Consciousness


  both feeling and content of awareness, may be under the focus of attention.
• Conscious Attention

  • monitor, and maintain awareness of how well we adapt to situations
  • controlling and planning future actions.
• SIGNAL DETECTION


  framework to explain how people pick out the few important stimuli when they are embedded in a wealth of irrelevant, distracting stimuli
• Hits (True Positives)

  Correctly identifies the presence of a target.
• False Alarm (False Positives)

  Incorrectly identifies the presence of a target that is actually absent.
• Misses (False Negatives)

  Fails to observe the presence of a target.
• Correct Rejection (True Negatives)

  Correctly identifies the absence of a target.
• VIGILANCE

  • person's ability to attend to a field of stimulation
  • waits to detect a signal stimulus that may appear at an unknown time.
• Search


  scan of the environment for particular features - actively looking for something when you are not sure where it will appear.
• Distracters


  non-target stimuli that divert our attention away from the target stimulus.
• Display Size


  number of items in a given visual array.
• FEATURE-INTEGRATION THEORY


  relative ease of conducting feature searches and the relative difficulty of conducting conjunction searcher.
• SIMILARITY THEORY


  result of the fact that as the similarity between target and distracter stimuli increases
• GUIDED SEARCH THEORY (Parallel Stage)


  simultaneously activates a mental representation of all the potential targets.
• GUIDED SEARCH THEORY (Subsequent serial stage)


  sequentially evaluated each of the activated elements, according to the degree of activation.
• Broadbent's Filter Model


  incoming information is filtered based on physical characteristics, allowing only attended information to pass through for further processing.
• Selective Filter Model


  attention can operate at higher levels to selectively filter stimuli based on factors such as semantic meaning or personal relevance, allowing some unattended information to be processed to a certain extent.
• Late Filter Model


  by Deutsch and Deutsch, suggests that all incoming information is processed for meaning before being selected for further processing
• Arousal


  overall state of arousal affects attention as well. You may be tired, drowsy, or drugged, which may limit attention.
• ALERTING


  being prepared to attend to some incoming event, and maintaining this attention.
• ORIENTING


  the selection of stimuli to attend to (when we perform a visual search)
• EXECUTIVE ATTENTION


  processes for monitoring and resolving conflicts that arise among internal processes
• Preattentive Processes


  Automatic processes that are rapid and occur in parallel.
• Attentive, Controlled Processes


  Occur later and are executed serially.
• Ericsson and Simon 1984


  good access to complex mental processes.
• Nisbett and Wilson 1977


  conscious of the product of our thinking but only vaguely conscious of the processes of thinking.
• Tomlinson et al., 2009 and Wegner 1997


  Thought suppression often does not work.
• Studying the Preconscious


  Priming when participants are presented first stimuli
• Spatial neglect or Hemi-neglect


  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.
• Blindsight


  traces of visual perceptual ability in blind areas