Full detailed summary Attention: Theory & Practice
Summary Attention: Theory and Practice, Leiden 2018/2019
Samenvatting Cognition and Attention (colleges + boek)
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Universiteit Leiden (UL)
Psychologie
Attention (6463ATTENY)
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Attention: Theory and Practice
H1 Historical overview of research on attention
The study of attention is concerned with how people are able to coordinate
perception and action to achieve goals. Attention plays a critical role in essentially all
aspects of perception, cognition, and action, influencing the choices you make.
Philosophy era
Leibniz: introduced apperception: an act that is necessary for an individual to
become conscious of a perceptual event. Attention also has a voluntary and directed
aspect: “Attention is a determination of the soul to know something in preference to
other things”.
Period from 1860-1909
Speed of mental processes
Wilhelm Wundt, responsible for introducing the study of attention to the field. The
time it takes to switch attention voluntarily from one stimulus to another had been
measured, led him to emphasize the voluntary control of action. Voluntarism;
volition; the study of conscious decision and choice. Two events occurring close
together in time are processed sequentially.
F.C. Donders, subtractive method; emphasizing that the time for a particular
process could be estimated by adding that process to a task and taking the difference
in RT between those tasks. Distinguished three types of reactions: a: simple
reaction, b: choice reaction, c: go or no-go reaction; respond to only one stimulus).
Each mental operation requires a period of time that can be measured.
Effects of attention
Helmholtz, attention is essential for visual perception and is limited.
Lotze, conscious attention occurs to varying degrees, which may be distinguished in
the consciousness according as simply the thing itself and its own nature is
conceived.
Pillsbury, conditions of an act of attention are to be found both in the environment and
in the past experience of the individual. The essence of attention as conscious
process in an increase in the clearness on one idea or a group of ideas at the
expense of others.
William James, Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form,
of one of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trans of thought.
Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal
from some things in order to deal effectively with others. The ideo-motor theory
of action: wherever movement follows unhesitatingly and immediately the notion of
it in the mind, we have ideo-motor action. If a task requires attention, it will interfere
with simultaneous performance of another task that also does require attention.
,Binet, attention could be understood in terms of interference. Mental addition
interfered with a task of rhythmically squeezing a rubble ball a certain number of
times, this did not occur when the timing and numbers of squeezes did not have to
be monitored.
Tichener, clearness is the central aspect of attention.
Pavlov, internal events can have facilitatory or inhibitory properties.
Sokolov, reflexive orienting to stimuli may occur.
Period from 1910 -1949
Jersild, the fact of mental set is primary in all conscious activity. The same stimulus
may evoke any one of a large number of responses depending upon the contextual
setting in which it is placed.
Telford, the psychological refractory period effect. Stimulation of neurons
was followed by a refractory phase during which the neurons were less sensitive to
stimulation. The RT to the second of two stimuli/tasks is increased when the interval
between their onsets is short; when the neurons haven’t had time to recover.
Stroop, Stroop test. Mix of color names and their colors; have to name the ink colors.
Period from 1950-1974
Cherry, dichotic listening; presented different messages to each ear through
headphones. Subjects were to repeat aloud, or shadow, one of the two messages
while ignoring the other. This was an easy task, but when questions were asked
about the unattended message, subjects were unable to describe anything about it
expect physical characteristics such as gender.
Broadbent, filter theory; model of attention following an experiment where he
presented subjects with a set of three digits one after the other to one ear and
another set at the same time to the other ear, with instructions to recall as many
digits as possible. Subjects tended to recall all the digits to one ear before trying the
other ear. According to the theory, information is held in a preattentive temporary
store, and only sensory events that have some physical feature in common are
selected to pass into the limited capacity processing system.
Treisman, filter-attenuation theory; early selection by filtering still precedes
stimulus identification, but the filter attenuates (reduces/filters) the information only
on unattended channels.
Period from 1975-present
Multiple resource models: studies showed that it is easier to perform two tasks
together when the tasks use different stimulus or response modalities than when they
use the same modalities. Performance is also better when one task is verbal and the
other is visuospatial, than when they are the same type.
,Navon and Gopher, attention was better viewed as multiple resources.
Wickens, different attentional resources exist for different sensory modalities, coding
modes, and response modalities. Multiple resource theory captures the fact that
multiple task performance typically is better when the tasks use different input-output
modes than when they use the same modes.
Space-based approach to attention: a widely used metaphor for visual attention
is that of a spotlight that is presumed to direct attention to everything in its field, in
which the attentional spotlight can be dissociated from the direction of gaze.
Exogenous and endogenous cues can trigger movement of the attentional spotlight
to a location; an exogenous cue is an external event; an endogenous cue is typically
a symbol such as a central arrowhead to must be identified before a voluntary shift in
attention; take longer to develop and are sustained for a longer period of time.
Treisman and Gelade, the feature integration theory, assumes that basic
feature of stimuli is encoded into feature maps in parallel across the visual field at a
preattentive stage.
Object-based approach to attention: view objects as being the primary unit on
which attention operates.
Duncan and Humphreys, object-based model of attention. In the first stage of
selection a visual representation if formed that is segmented into object-like units and
that contains meaning codes. It is a stage of perceptual grouping and description,
which operates in parallel across the visual field, followed by competitive interaction
between inputs. Input is weighted relative to the degree to which it matches a
representation of the information needed for current behavior. A prime stimulus
precedes the imperative stimulus to which the subject is to respond. Negative priming
(ignore one stimulus and respond to another) result to slower responding when the
stimulus had to be ignored.
Neumann and Allport, selection-for-action view. Attentional limitations should
not be attributed to a limited capacity resource of mechanism. Instead, limitations are
byproducts of the need to coordinate action and ensure that the correct stimulus
information is controlling the intended responses.
, H2 Information processing and the study of attention
Information processing approach focuses on the processes by which
information in a stimulus is translated to a response.
The information processing approach
The information processing framework. Stimuli are processed in three distinct stages:
perceptual processes (perception/stimulus identification), response selection (and
decision making; also called stimulus-response translation), and response
processing (/programming and execution).
Information theory
Central idea in the human information processing approach is that the human is not
just a receiver of information, but also a transmitter of information. The human can be
described as an information channel.
Information and stages
Information builds up over time following stimulus presentation. The buildup or
accumulation of evidence over time can be conceived of as occurring continuously
from the moment of stimulus presentation to the execution of a response. This might
be the case for extremely simple, reflexive action. However, most behavior is more
complicated, and evidence must be evaluated, weighted, or combined before an
appropriate action can be selected.
The measurement of information processing time was set on a firm footing with
Donders’s subtractive method for measuring the duration of processes. Which
consists of comparing tasks that differ only in the processing stage of interest and
taking the difference in completion times for the two tasks as measure of the time
needed to complete the process of interest.
Sternberg, the additive factors method: determining which stages are involved
in a particular information processing task. It can be used to infer the presence of
particular stages. Several factors are manipulated and the effect of these
manipulations on time to perform the task are examined. If two factors have additive
effects, they are assumed to affect different stages. If the factors interact, they are
assumed to affect the same stage of processing.
Summary of conclusions drawn from additive factors studies of human information
processing:
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