4PAHPBIO Psychology and the Brain Week 5
Psychology BSc Year 1 Attention
ATTENTION
5.1 THE DEFINITION OF ATTENTION ACCORDING TO COGNITIVE
PSYCHOLOGISTS AND NEUROSCIENTISTS.
ATTENTION
• Attention is the process that enhances some and inhibits other information
o Enhancement allows the selection of important or relevant information for further
cognitive processing
o Inhibition allows us to ignore or filter out other non-relevant information
• The brain is a limited processer, so attention is a mechanism that maximises its limited capacity
resource
o It acts as a gate between perception and consciousness
• The ability to pay attention is complex
o William James (1842-1910) noted that attention operates within and across modalities
(i.e. across time, space and objects)
Inhibiting Distractors
• The ability to suppress or block irrelevant information, responses, or distractions to focus on a task
• Relevant information (from attended stimuli) passes through to be processed, while non-relevant
information (from unattended stimuli) is blocked out
5.2 DIFFERENCES AND INTER-RELATIONS BETWEEN SELECTIVE
AND SUSTAINED ATTENTION.
Attentional Control (Concentration)
• An individual’s ability to control which stimuli (internal or external) they pay attention to at a given
moment by focusing cognitive recourses and ignoring other information
o It can be categorised into four types of attention: selective, sustained, alternating and
divided attention
• Vicera et al. (2014) argue that attention is driven by experience
o If an individual has experience with a stimulus, attention will be more stimulus-driven,
whereas if they have limited or no experience with a stimulus, attention will be more goal-
driven
o Attention becomes more goal-driven as experience grows
SELECTIVE ATTENTION
• The ability to select one or more elements of a stimulus to pay attention to whilst filtering out other
elements that are often irrelevant
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, 4PAHPBIO Psychology and the Brain Week 5
Psychology BSc Year 1 Attention
Dichotic Listening
• Used in early studies to investigate selective attention
o Different stimuli played simultaneously in both ears whilst participants were told to focus
on the sound input in only one ear and repeat it back (shadowing)
o They often could report the correct information from the attended ear and very little from
the unattended ear (Cherry, 1953)
• This demonstrates selective attention as participants could choose information to pay attention to
and ignore irrelevant information
• However, participants could report some of their unattended channel, such as whether it contained
human speech and whether the speaker was male or female or had a high or low voice
o This suggests that some information, particularly physical attributes, can leak through to
attention, whilst the semantic content is ignored
Broadbent’s Filter Theory
• Broadbent (1958) suggests that we use a filtering method whereby some information can leak
through to attention from an unattended stimulus
• We can inhibit responses to expected distractor stimuli in the unattended channel, but if we
experience an unexpected distraction, it leaks through and cannot be inhibited
The Cocktail Party Effect
• Suggests that we can focus on one conversation in a noisy environment, but salient information, like
our name, can capture attention from unattended stimuli
o Other information that holds personal importance can catch attention, such as a favourite
restaurant or a recently seen movie (Conway et al., 2001; Wood & Cowan, 1995)
• Röer and Cowan (2020) found this when a third of participants recognised their own name being
spoken and almost nothing else in the unattended input
Inattentional Blindness (Mack & Rock, 1998)
• Where people fail to notice unexpected stimuli in their environment because their attention is
focused on a specific task
o Promotes our attention to desired stimuli but prevents the awareness of unexpected
stimuli, even if they are obvious
• Mack and Rock (1998) instructed participants to point their eyes to the
centre point of a screen and to make judgments about the “+” shown
just off to the side
o However, the dot itself briefly changed to another shape
o If participants weren’t warned about this (and so didn’t pay
attention to the dot), they failed to detect the change, even
though looking at the dot the whole time
• Inattentional deafness (Dalton & Fraenkel, 2012) and inattentional numbness (Murphy & Dalton,
2016) can also occur when participants fail to hear or feel, respectively, prominent stimuli if they
aren’t expecting them
The Invisible Gorilla (Simons & Chabris, 1999)
• Participants were asked to count basketball passes between players wearing white and black
shirts, leading most participants to miss someone in a gorilla costume walking through the scene
• Demonstrates how selective attention filters our perception, allowing us to process relevant
information but often at the cost of missing unrelated yet significant details
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