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PS1003 Cognitive Psychology:Attention lectures (Autumn 2005)

•Holcombe lectures–Reduced version of powerpoint on my webpage (Google: “AlexHolcombe”) and on Blackboard–Posted after each lecture

•MCQ (from Holcombe)–Eysenck & Keane (2000). Cognitive Psychology: AStudent’s Handbook.–All of chapter 5. Today- pages 120-4 and Simons & Ambinder(2005). Change blindness: Theory and Consequences, availablein 2nd floor Resources Room and on Blackboard.–Anything in chapter 5 is fair game–Lecture material mostly covers important subset of book topics–If in lecture and book, likely to be on test–If in lecture only, somewhat likely–If in book only, less likely

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Today’s lecture

•What is attention?•Selection•Capacity•Selective listening•Where is info lost?•High-level selection in cocktail party•Top-down, bottom-up

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What is attention?

•Attention is many things•Please “pay attention”!

–Implies have to choose to do what?•Audition: “You’re not listening to me!”

–hearing vs. listening•Vision: “Sorry, I didn’t notice”?

–Scientific rephrase- “sorry, I wasn’t visually attending”–Can you look straight at something and not notice it?

•Smell:?

Sorry, I wasn’t olfactorily attending 4

What is attention?•Selection- picking some things to exclusion of others

–Usually point our eyes directly at selection–Sometimes use our mind without moving eyes–aka focus of attention

•Capacity–Have a finite amount of resources to allocateamong different tasks,processes?–E.g. hearing, seeing, patting head, rubbingtummy?

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Cavanagh diagram

Central, consciousrepresentation

RetinalInput

PrimaryVisual

System

System

Other“low-level”channels

eg

Daydreaming

Other stuff

Vision

Motor

• Seem to havespecialized, fairlyautomatic perceptualprocessing and moregeneral cognitive

• Attention selectsinformation for specialprocessing

Selectionbottleneck

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Cavanagh diagram

Central, consciousrepresentation

RetinalInput

PrimaryVisual

System

System

Other“low-level”channels

eg

Selectionbottleneck Daydreaming

Other stuff

Vision

Motor

• High-capacity parallelprocessing meetslower-capacity serial

• Attention is where thewill meets the automatic

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• Helps us understand human performance incommon tasks (visual search- security etc.)

• Helps us understand and develop therapies forrelated diseases (parietal stroke- neglect)

• Fundamental architecture of human mind• Inspires development of artificial vision systems• Helps us design computer user interfaces

Who cares?

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Design interfaces: Informationoverload

WWI

WWII

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Information overload

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Who needs it?•Why not have unlimited capacity and noselection process?

–Need selection for access to action•Only have two arms, can only direct action at twothings at a time•Don’t want to notice feeling of socks on feet, glasseson nose, pants on•Don’t want one part of brain pulling you one way whileother part pulls you other way

–Head too small to have enough neurons to fullyprocess everything in visual field, auditory field,skin

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How much capacity is there?

• Unattended (unselected) things notprocessed as much

• True for all senses• Audition

– “I wasn’t listening”: shadow left ear whilesecond voice speaks in right ear

12after the listener has finished shadowing,test what they remember from other stream…

brain

paper

light

aircraft

shirt

...

fruit

morning

planet

door

swan

...

brain

paper

light

aircraft

shirt

...

fruit

morning

planet

door

swan

...

Shadowing left ear

brain, paper, light,

brain

paper

light

aircraft

shirt

...

fruit

morning

planet

door

swan

...

Shadowing right ear

fruit, morning, planet,

• Experimenter select one of the streams (left orright), and the listener repeats (“shadows”)what is being said

Selective Listening

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Audition: When you don’t payattention

• Unattended (unselected) things not usuallyremembered– Almost no words remembered– Change in language usually not reported

• Some things break through– large change in volume– change in gender of speaker– “You may stop now” 6%– “John Smith, you may stop now” 33%– Ss told may be further instructions, “John Smith, you

may stop now” 80%• How can we explain these discrepancies in what

is reported? 14

How far does the unselected info get?

Sensoryregister

STMconsciousness

Perceptualprocessing, recognition

Long-termmemory

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• Maybe person actually was attending?– Almost never sure in these experiments

• Capacity limit– On perceptual processing?

• Probably not, because some important things break through• Can’t tell whether they’re important until perceptually process them, so

must be perceptually processing them• Perceptual adaptation effects (see perception lectures) still work

– On transfer into memory?• Maybe flit through consciousness but not put into memory unless important

or primed– On retention?

• Didn’t ask person until after shadowing task over• Maybe like dreams

Sensoryregister

STMconsciousness

Perceptualprocessing, recognition

Long-termmemory

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• Internal zombie on the lookout forimportant/primed material?

• Even when sleeping, name wakes youup

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Flip side: SELECTION at Cocktail party• Seem to have capacity limitation for understanding

conversations- need to protect cognition• How do we screen out all the other conversations to

follow the person you’re talking to?• Perception has to do complicated pre-processing to

segregate

• Selection bypitch isn’talways enough

• Important tohave zombiesystem to detectalert signals,e.g. your name