Lecture notes
Cognitive Psychology Attention: Lecture Notes
- Module
- Cognitive Psychology
- Institution
- Swansea University (SWAN)
Introduction to Attention: Cognitive Psychology
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Introduction to attention and Selective AttentionWhat is attention-
● Attention can mean several things
● William James 1890s ‘’attention.. Taking possession of the mind’’
● Attention of processing to a particular task
● Processing-tend to be looking at it, visual*
General types of attention-
● not as a single process but an ‘umbrella’ term for a set of processes that
assist in our information processing.
● William James (1890) made a distinction between two ‘modes’ of attention
1. Active attention: This is where attention is controlled ‘top-down’, i.e. it is
controlled and purposefully deployed due to some motivational reason for
attending to a specific item e.g point and look
2. Passive attention: This is where attention is deployed in a ‘bottom-up’ fashion
because of some property of external stimuli e.g loud bang
● This distinction, between bottom-up and top-down deployment of attention is still
very much in use today.
● Basically, if we are able to attend to something we are able to process much
more of it.
Attention isn’t just separated by what effects it’s deployment-
● deploy our attention
● either focus our attention on a single thing or region of space, or we can divide
● Focused(selective) attention: This form of attention is the kind of thing we see
when we present participants with two or more stimuli and ask them to attend
(and/or respond) to only one of them e.g monkey illusion keep track ball
● Divided Attention: We can think of this like multitasking, as above we present
the participants with multiple stimuli/inputs but ask the participant to attend
(and/or respond) to all of them. E.g boy who spotted all in monkey illusion
● consider attention to be an effortful process
● Attention requires effort
● above approaches tells us something different about the way we are able to
process the world.
● In many cases the best way of looking at attention is not what processes there
are, but what the effect of attention is
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