🥯Learning Unit 10 – Attention and Information Processing

Key Concepts

• Attention involves selectively focusing on specific stimuli while ignoring others
• Information processing refers to how the brain receives, encodes, stores, and retrieves information
• Selective attention filters out irrelevant information to focus on what's important (cocktail party effect)
• Divided attention involves simultaneously attending to multiple stimuli or tasks (driving while talking)
• Sustained attention maintains focus on a single task over an extended period (reading a textbook)
  • Vigilance tasks measure sustained attention by requiring individuals to detect infrequent signals
• Top-down attention is goal-directed and influenced by prior knowledge and expectations
• Bottom-up attention is stimulus-driven and involuntarily captured by salient or novel stimuli
• Attentional capacity is limited, constraining the amount of information that can be processed at once

Theories of Attention

• Broadbent's Filter Theory proposes that attention acts as a selective filter, allowing only attended information to pass through for further processing
  • Unattended information is filtered out early in the processing stream
• Treisman's Attenuation Theory suggests that unattended information is attenuated rather than completely filtered out
  • Attenuated information can still be processed to some extent and may capture attention if highly relevant or salient
• Deutsch and Deutsch's Late Selection Theory argues that all information is processed to a semantic level before attention selects relevant information for further processing
• Kahneman's Capacity Theory proposes that attention is a limited resource that can be flexibly allocated among tasks
  • The amount of attentional capacity available depends on factors such as arousal and task demands
• Feature Integration Theory (Treisman) suggests that attention is necessary to bind individual features (color, shape) into coherent object representations
• Guided Search Theory (Wolfe) proposes that attention is guided by both bottom-up (stimulus-driven) and top-down (goal-directed) factors during visual search

Types of Attention

• Focused attention involves concentrating on a single stimulus while ignoring distractions (studying in a noisy library)
• Selective attention filters out irrelevant information to focus on what's important (listening to a friend in a crowded restaurant)
  • Involves both enhancing attended information and suppressing unattended information
• Divided attention involves simultaneously attending to multiple stimuli or tasks (taking notes while listening to a lecture)
  • Performance on individual tasks may suffer when dividing attention
• Sustained attention maintains focus on a single task over an extended period (air traffic control)
  • Requires vigilance and resistance to distractions or fatigue
• Alternating attention involves shifting focus between two or more tasks (cooking while helping with homework)
  • Requires cognitive flexibility and efficient task-switching
• Overt attention involves directing sensory organs (eyes, ears) towards the attended stimulus
• Covert attention involves mentally focusing on a stimulus without overt sensory orientation

Information Processing Models

• Stage Theory (Atkinson-Shiffrin) proposes that information flows through three discrete stages: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory
  • Attention is required to transfer information from sensory memory to short-term memory
• Levels of Processing Theory (Craik and Lockhart) suggests that the depth of processing determines how well information is remembered
  • Shallow processing (perceptual features) leads to weaker memory traces than deep processing (meaning, associations)
• Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) models propose that information is processed simultaneously across a network of interconnected nodes
  • Attention emerges from the interaction of bottom-up and top-down activation within the network
• Multiple Resource Theory (Wickens) suggests that there are multiple pools of attentional resources that can be allocated independently
  • Tasks that rely on different resources (visual vs. auditory) can be performed more efficiently than those competing for the same resources
• Baddeley's Working Memory Model includes a central executive component that controls attention and coordinates information from two slave systems (visuospatial sketchpad, phonological loop)

Attention and Memory

• Attention is necessary for encoding information into memory
  • Unattended information is less likely to be remembered than attended information
• Attention influences which information is transferred from sensory memory to short-term/working memory
• The level of attention during encoding affects the depth of processing and subsequent memory retention
  • Divided attention during encoding leads to poorer memory performance than full attention
• Attention is required to maintain information in working memory and to manipulate it for complex cognitive tasks
• Attention guides retrieval from long-term memory by focusing on relevant cues and inhibiting irrelevant information
• Attentional capture by emotionally salient stimuli can enhance memory for those stimuli (flashbulb memories)
• Attention and memory interact bidirectionally, with prior knowledge and expectations guiding attention and attention modulating memory formation and retrieval

Factors Affecting Attention

• Arousal level influences attentional capacity and performance
  • Moderate arousal enhances attention, while low or high arousal can impair it (Yerkes-Dodson Law)
• Motivation directs attention towards goal-relevant stimuli and enhances vigilance
• Emotion can capture attention, with emotionally salient stimuli (threats, rewards) receiving prioritized processing
• Expectations and prior knowledge guide attention in a top-down manner, facilitating detection of expected stimuli
• Perceptual load affects selective attention, with high load reducing processing of irrelevant information
• Task difficulty and complexity influence the allocation of attentional resources
• Distractions and interruptions can disrupt attention and impair performance, especially for demanding tasks
• Fatigue and sleep deprivation can impair sustained attention and vigilance

Practical Applications

• Attention training techniques (mindfulness, meditation) can enhance attentional control and reduce distractibility
• Designing user interfaces and displays to guide attention towards critical information (warnings, alerts)
• Optimizing learning environments to minimize distractions and promote focused attention
  • Reducing background noise, providing clear instructions, and breaking tasks into manageable chunks
• Developing strategies to manage divided attention and multitasking in complex work environments (air traffic control, emergency response)
• Utilizing knowledge of attentional biases (threat bias in anxiety) to inform clinical interventions and treatments
• Applying principles of attention to improve safety in high-risk settings (aviation, healthcare)
  • Designing protocols and checklists to ensure critical information is attended to
• Leveraging attentional capture to create effective advertisements and marketing campaigns
• Considering individual differences in attention (ADHD, aging) when designing educational and occupational accommodations

Research and Experiments

• Dichotic listening tasks (Cherry) demonstrate selective attention by presenting different audio streams to each ear and asking participants to attend to one stream
  • Participants often fail to notice salient information in the unattended stream, illustrating the limits of unattended processing
• Visual search tasks (Treisman) investigate how attention is deployed to find targets among distractors
  • Reaction times increase with the number of distractors for conjunction searches (target defined by multiple features) but not for feature searches (target defined by a single feature)
• Stroop task (Stroop) measures selective attention and cognitive control by asking participants to name the color of a word while ignoring its meaning
  • Slower responses for incongruent trials (word "blue" in red ink) than congruent trials (word "red" in red ink) demonstrate the difficulty of overriding automatic word reading
• Attentional blink paradigm (Raymond) reveals a temporary lapse in attention following the detection of an initial target in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream
  • Participants often fail to detect a second target presented shortly after the first, suggesting that attentional resources are depleted for a brief period
• Inattentional blindness studies (Simons and Chabris) highlight how focusing attention on one task can lead to the failure to notice salient but unexpected stimuli
  • In the famous "invisible gorilla" study, participants counting passes in a basketball game often fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene
• Change blindness experiments (Rensink) demonstrate that even large changes in a visual scene can go unnoticed when attention is not directed towards the changing element
  • This suggests that attention is necessary for change detection and that our visual representations are not as detailed as we believe
• Dual-task paradigms investigate the limits of divided attention by requiring participants to perform two tasks simultaneously
  • Performance decrements in one or both tasks indicate the difficulty of dividing attention and the existence of a central attentional bottleneck