Summary Attention: Theory and Practice
Suzanne de Vries | IBP 2018-2019 | Year 2 | Block 3
,Chapter 1: historical overview of research on attention
How people are able to coordinate perception and action to achieve goals. Attention plays critical role
in about all aspects of perception, cognition and action. History in five periods.
The philosophical period
Role of attention in conscious awareness and thought, voluntarily or involuntarily. Vives: the more
closely one attends to stimuli, the better they will be retained. Malebranche: attention to prevent ideas
from becoming confused and to make them clear. Leibnitz: apperception → the act to become
conscious of perceptual event (automatic/voluntary). Herbart: apperception involved relating newly
perceived ideas to ones already contained in the mind. Hamilton: span of attention is more than one
object.
The period from 1860 to 1909
Experimental approach.
Speed of mental processes
Wundt: introducing study of attention. Astronomers’ “personal equation”. About voluntary control of
attention. Donders: speed of mental processes. Identify stimulus and select motor response. In the
subtractive method, three types of reactions: a (simple), b (choice) and c (go or no-go). The
difference between c and a is the stimulus identification, between b and c is the ‘expression of the
will’. Exner: performance of simple RT tasks characterized by voluntary preparation that occurs prior
to the presentation of the stimulus. Lange: preparatory sets that focused on sensory and motor stages.
Merkel: choice RT increases as function of the number of possible stimulus-response alternatives.
Effects of attention
Von Helmholtz: attention could be directed, and is limited. Wundt: attention as inner activity that
caused ideas to be present to differing degrees in consciousness. Voluntarism. Lotze: conscious
attention occurs to varying degrees. Pillsbury: conditions of act of attention are in environment and
past experiences. Task set: readiness to carry out instructed action in response to given stimulus.
James: attention is taking possession by the mind (clear and vivid) one of what seem several
simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. About the functional and selective aspects.
Titchener: clearness important. How obtained? Direct or indirect by inhibiting the sensations that are
not attended to. James classified attention:
Either directed to objects of sense (sensorial attention) or ideal/represented objects (intellectual
attention), is either immediate or derived, and may be either passive/reflex/non-voluntary/effortless or
active/voluntary. Exogenous control: attention drawn automatically. Endogenous control: voluntary.
Immediate effects of attention are to make us: perceive, conceive, distinguish and remember better
than otherwise, and it shortens RT. Lotze: links between movements and their mental representations
are bi-directional. “Ideomotor action”. Ideomotor theory of action: wherever movement follows
unhesitatingly and immediately the notion of it in the mind. Binet: about interference.
,The period from 1910 to 1949
Work reached a low but there was still work conducted. Jersild: mental set and shift, task-switching
costs. Telford: psychological refractory period → RT to the second of two stimuli/tasks is increased
when interval between their onsets is short. Stroop: stimulus information that is irrelevant to task can
have major impact on performance, Stroop effect. Mental set does not necessarily involve motor
adjustments.
The period from 1950 to 1974
‘Cognitive revolution’. Interplay between technical applications and theory. Mackworth: vigilance
decrement. Cherry: selective attention, dichotic listening task → shadow one of two messages
while ignoring the other. Broadbent: filter theory → information is held in preattentive temporary
store and only sensory events that have some physical feature in common are selected to pass into
limited capacity processing system. Treisman: filter-attenuation theory → filter attenuates the
information only on unattended channels. Allow identification if stimulus has low identification
threshold (name etc.). Deutsch and Deutsch: late-selection theory → unattended stimuli are always
identified. Kahneman: unitary capacity/resource theory → attention is single resource that can be
divided among different tasks in different amounts. Also the measuring of event-related potentials.
The period from 1975 to present
Multiple resource models: easier to perform two tasks together when they use different stimulus or
response modalities, or different input-output modes. Space-based approach: about attentional
spotlight, at which processed more efficiently. Exogenous cues have rapid performance benefits and
dissipate quickly, endogenous cues have benefits that take longer to develop and are sustained longer.
Treisman and Gelade: feature integration theory → basic features of stimuli are encoded into
feature maps in parallel across the visual field at preattentive stage. Performance in conjunctive search
tasks decreases as number of distractors increases. Object-based approach: objects as being primary
unit on which attention operates. Perceptual grouping and description, interaction between inputs.
Also priming studies, including negative priming. Neumann and Allport: selection-for-action view
→ limitations are byproducts of need to coordinate action and ensure that correct stimulus information
is controlling the intended responses.
, Chapter 2: information processing and the study of
attention
To specify role of attention in performance, necessary to describe course of information processing.
Information processing approach: processes by which information in a stimulus is translated to a
response.
The information processing approach
Three processing stages: perception, decision making and response selection, and response
programming and execution. Basic idea that processing can be described in terms of more-or-less
separate activities.
Information theory
Human is receiver and transmitter of information. Performance will depend on quality of information,
speed and reliability of person’s ‘equipment’ and how quickly and accurately the information is
relayed. If no reduction of uncertainty has taken place, no information has been transmitted, s.a. when
different stimuli are possible. Amount of information in stimulus: bits. Formula: log2(N). Human
processing in bits per second. Hick-Hyman law: reaction time in task is linearly related to the amount
of information transmitted. Slope: efficiency.
Information and stages
Evidence must be evaluated, weighted, or combined before appropriate action can be selected.
Processed in series of discrete stages. Measurement of information processing time: Donders’
subtractive method. Assumptions: processing stages are distinct and independent, insertion of
additional process does not alter basic task structure (assumption of pure insertion). Addition of
stages that change focus of subject from stimuli to the responses might lead to changes in one or more
other stages. Sternberg: additive factors method. To infer presence of particular stages. Effects of
manipulations on time to perform the task are examined and underlying processing stages are inferred.
Factors have additive effects when they affect different stages. When two or more factors affect a
common stage, the effect of a factor can depend on the levels of the other factors (interaction). Stage
robustness: robust if number of experiments produce data consistent with proposed stages, and when
two factors show additive effects and adding a third factor does not result in higher-order interaction.
