ATTENTION

Attention
Attention is a term given to a perceptual process that selects certain input for inclusion into our
conscious experience or awareness in a given period of time.

Attention is the means by which we actively process a limited amount of information from the
enormous amount of information available through our senses, our stored memories, and our
other cognitive processes.

It includes both conscious and unconscious processes.

Attention can be defined as a concentration of mental activity that allows you to take in a
limited portion of the vast stream of information available from both your sensory world and
your memory.
Attentional process

➢ The mechanism that operates in selecting and processing the stimuli that are of
great interest and highly valuable to us for adjustment is called as the attentional
process.
➢It is a sensory process.
➢ It is not one process or one system; it refers to multiple coordinated systems and
processes
Kinds of attention
❑ Signal detection and vigilance
❑ Search
❑ Selective attention
❑ Divided attention
 Kinds of attention
❑ Signal detection and vigilance: On many occasions, we vigilantly try to detect whether we did or did not
sense a signal. We try to detect the appearance of a particular stimulus.

Eg- life guards at beach, Air traffic controllers, for example, keep an eye on all traffic near and over the
airport, Luggage screeners.

❑ Vigilance : waiting to detect a signal

When you have to pay attention in order to detect a stimulus that can occur at any time over a long period
of time, you need to be vigilant.

Vigilance refers to a person’s ability to attend to a field of stimulation over a prolonged period, during
which the person seeks to detect the appearance of a particular target stimulus of interest.
❑ How are signals detected?

❑ Discriminating between target signals and

distractors
2. Search: We often engage in an active search for particular
stimuli. We try to find a signal amidst distracters, for example,
when we are looking for our lost cell phone, trained police dogs,
detecting smoke and actively searching for the source.
Picking up parents

It refers to a scan of the environment for particular features—

actively looking for something when you are not sure where it will
appear.
3.
Selective attention
➢ Paying attention to certain kinds of information while ignoring
other ongoing information
➢eg- reading a text book , or watching a reel while ignoring other
things happening around.

4. Divided attention
➢ Paying equal attention to two or more kinds of information
simultaneously, responding appropriately to each message.
➢ Eg- A phone talk while cooking and driving.
➢ Both your speed and your accuracy suffer, especially when
the tasks are challenging.
Selective attention tasks

❑Dichotic listening,

❑The Stroop Effect, and

❑Visual Search.
Dichotic listening
Dichotic listening
In general, people can process only one message at a time (Cowan, 2005).

However, people are more likely to process the unattended message when

(1) both messages are presented slowly,

(2) the main task is not challenging, and

(3) the meaning of the unattended message is immediately relevant

In addition, when people perform a dichotic listening task, they sometimes notice when their
name is inserted in the unattended message.
Stroop effect
❑It takes longer to pay attention to a color when they are distracted by another feature of the stimulus—namely,
the meaning of the name itself (Styles, 2006).

❑ Eg. People take a long time to name the ink color when that color is used in printing an incongruent word. In
contrast, they can quickly name that same ink color when it appears as a solid patch of color.
❑The more automatic processes (reading the word) interferes with the less
automatic process (naming the color of the ink). As a result, we
automatically – and involuntarily – read the words.

❑According to PDP, the stroop task activates two pathways at the same
time. One pathway is activated by the task of naming the ink color, and
other pathway is activated by the task of reading the word.

❑ Interference occurs when two competing pathways are active at the same
time. As a result task performance suffers.

❑A related technique - the emotional Stroop task.

 Divided attention

Multitasking:
➢ Trying to accomplish two or more tasks at the same time.

1. strain the limits of attention,

2. limits of their working memory and
3. long-term memory
RESEARCH: People using cell phones while engaged in another cognitive task.
▪ Eg., college students walk more slowly while talking on cell phones (Hyman, 2010).
▪ College students read their textbooks significantly more slowly while responding to instant messages.
▪ Students also earn lower grades when they are tested on the material they had been reading while multitasking (Bowman et al.,
2010).
❑ Conversing on a handheld cell phone → More driving errors , compared to driving
without conversation (Folk, 2010; Kubose et al., 2006; Strayer & Drews, 2007).

A general guideline

Work on one task at a time→ accurate and faster performance (Chabris & Simons, 2010).

➢ Strayer and his colleagues discovered that the participants who used cell phones
showed a form of inattentional blindness.

➢ eg, their attention was reduced for information that appeared in the center of their
visual field. Even if you use a hands-free cell phone, your attention may wander away
from a dangerous situation right in front of you.
➢ Two kinds of visual processing errors:

1. Change blindness- failing to detect a change in an object or scene.

2. Inattentional blindness- fail to notice when an unexpected object, but completely visible, suddenly appears.

Task switching

➢ closely related to multitasking.

➢ If you are deeply engrossed in writing a research paper and your roommate keeps interrupting, you are likely to

work more slowly and make more errors during the transitions (Kiesel et al., 2010; Vandierendonck et al., 2010).
 Visual Search
In visual search, the observer must find a target in a visual display that has numerous distractors.

❖ Eg. airport security officers search travelers’ luggage for possible weapons, and

❖ Radiologists search a mammogram to detect a tumor that could indicate breast cancer.

➢ Create a mental image of the object → allocate attention to specific areas of the visual display
where the object could be found.

➢ Factors that influence visual searches-

➢ frequent appearance of target stimuli- accurate identification.

factors that influence visual searches-

1. The isolated-feature/combined-feature effect (Treisman and Gelade (1980).

2. The feature-present/feature-absent effect (Triesman and Souther, 1985)

Isolated /combined feature effect
Treisman and Gelade (1980).
Isolated /combined feature

Isolated effect
➢when the target is a simple feature and differs from the
irrelevant items- Target detection is faster

Combined effect
➢Pay attention to one item at a time, using serial processing.
➢Distracted by stimuli that resembles the target

Finding: locating an isolated feature is usually faster than a

combined feature (Quinlan, 2010).
The feature-present/feature-absent effect

➢Our cognitive processes handle positive information better than

negative information.

➢Search is rapid when we are looking for a particular feature that is

present.

Finding: People can typically locate a feature that is present more

quickly than a feature that is absent.
Feature present or absent

➢ Part A ➢ Part B
Visual search

➢ We search more quickly for an isolated feature, as

opposed to a conjunction of two features.

➢ We search more quickly for a feature that is

present
as opposed to a feature that is absent.
Eye Movements in Reading
When do we move our eyes?

❑ When we are looking at a scene,

❑ Searching for a visual target,

❑ When we are driving and also

❑ When we are speaking.

❖ Eye movements provide important information about the way our minds operate when we perform a
number of everyday cognitive tasks
❑ How do we move our eyes?
➢ We move eyes smoothly and continuously across a line of text.
➢ But in reality, your eyes actually make a series of little jumps as they move across the page.

Saccadic eye movement

➢ Patterns of eye movements that people make when they read.

➢ Rapid movement of the eyes from one spot to the next is known as saccadic eye movement.

➢ The purpose of a saccadic eye movement during reading is to bring the center of your retina into position
over the words you want to read.

➢ A very small region in the center of the retina, known as the fovea, has better acuity than other retinal
regions. Therefore, the eye must be moved in order to register new words on the fovea.

➢ R: Each saccade moves your eye forward by about seven to nine letters (Rayner, 1998).

➢ Researchers have estimated that people make between 150,000 and 200,000 saccadic
movements every day
➢ You cannot process much visual information when your eyes
are moving. →

➢ Fixation occurs during the period between two saccadic

movements.

➢ During each fixation, your visual system pauses briefly in order

to acquire information that is useful for comprehending the
written text.

➢ The duration of a fixation in English → 200 to 250 milliseconds.

although many factors influence precisely how long an individual
fixation will last.
➢ Perceptual span, or iconic memory, refers to the amount of
information that can be captured at a glance and held
shortly in a sensory store.

➢ The term perceptual span refers to the number of letters

and spaces that we perceive during a fixation.

➢ R: Perceptual span varies from person to person.

➢ In English- It includes four positions to the left of the

letter (you are looking at), and 15 positions to the right of
that central letter (Rayner, 2009).
➢When readers fixate a current word, parafoveal
preview benefits are experienced.

➢Parafoveal preview- Ability to access information

about upcoming words even if a person is currently
fixated on a word to the left of those words.

➢Parafoveal preview can cause shorter fixation

durations on a nearby word when information
about the properties of the text is available
parafoveally.
➢ Example: Parafoveal preview effect
The material in the extreme right side of the perceptual span is
useful for noticing the white spaces between words, because
these spaces provide information about word length.

➢However, a word that lies more than eight spaces to the right
of the fixation point will not be accessed easily.
 How saccadic movements work
➢Saccadic eye movements show several predictable patterns.
Example, when the eye jumps forward in a saccadic movement, it usually
moves toward the center of a word, rather than to a blank space between
words or between sentences (Engbert & Krügel, 2010).
➢The eye also jumps past short words,
➢ Words that appear frequently in a language (and, the, that, is, for, to)..
➢ Words that are highly predictable in a sentence (Engbert & Krügel, 2010).
➢In contrast, the size of the saccadic movement is small if
the next word in a sentence is misspelled or if it is unusual.
(Pynte et al., 2004; Rayner et al., 2004).

➢The general pattern of eye movements gets influenced by

some factors such as the properties of written language
system.

➢ Eg. Chinese readers move their eyes only two to three

characters in a saccade.
Selective Attention in Reading
➢ Reading is one of the most complex behaviors that humans can perform.
➢Reading involves the coordination of visual, linguistic, oculomotor, and
attentional systems.
All of these systems must work together → whether to move the eyes to
a new word, or to gather more information by continuing to fixate the
same location.
➢ This decision must be made quickly, given that the average fixation on a
word is only 200–250 milliseconds
Selective Attention in Reading contd..
➢Fixate a word long enough to gather as much
information as necessary before moving on.
➢ Make a decision about where to move your
eyes next.
➢“It was so windy today that Caitie left work
early to go outside and fly a before going
home for the day”.
Selective Attention component in Reading Process

➢R: Predictable words → skipped, than non predictable

ones.
If not skipped → then fixation is of short time
➢ Good readers differ from poor readers with respect to
their saccadic eye movements.
Eye movement patterns and fixations
Good reader

Poor reader.
Eye movement patterns and fixations
GOOD READER POOR READER

Make larger jumps. Make shorter jumps

Less likely to make regressions. More regressions

Shorter pauses before moving Longer pauses
onward.

➢ The pattern and speed of our saccadic eye movements

are influenced by variety of cognitive factors (eg-
differences in attentional abilities)

➢ Saccadic eye movements clearly help us become more

active, flexible readers.