Key Concepts of Attention Mechanisms to Know for Intro to Cognitive Science

Attention mechanisms are crucial for how we process information in our environment. They help us focus on important stimuli, manage distractions, and understand our limitations in multitasking, shaping our cognitive experiences and interactions with the world around us.

1. Selective attention

   • The process of focusing on a specific stimulus while ignoring others.
   • Essential for managing cognitive resources and avoiding information overload.
   • Often studied through tasks like the Stroop test or dichotic listening.

2. Divided attention

   • The ability to distribute attention across multiple tasks or stimuli simultaneously.
   • Performance can decline when tasks require similar cognitive resources.
   • Important in understanding multitasking and its limitations.

3. Sustained attention

   • The capacity to maintain focus on a task or stimulus over an extended period.
   • Critical for tasks that require vigilance, such as monitoring or surveillance.
   • Can be affected by fatigue, distractions, and task complexity.

4. Bottom-up attention

   • Attention driven by external stimuli, such as sudden movements or loud noises.
   • Involves automatic processing and is often reflexive in nature.
   • Plays a key role in detecting novel or salient features in the environment.

5. Top-down attention

   • Attention guided by internal goals, expectations, or prior knowledge.
   • Involves active decision-making and cognitive control.
   • Important for tasks that require selective focus based on context or relevance.

6. Attentional blink

   • A phenomenon where the second of two targets is missed if presented within 200-500 milliseconds of the first.
   • Illustrates limitations in processing capacity and temporal attention.
   • Relevant in understanding how attention is allocated over time.

7. Inattentional blindness

   • The failure to notice a fully visible but unexpected object when attention is focused elsewhere.
   • Demonstrates the limits of conscious awareness and selective attention.
   • Often illustrated through experiments like the "invisible gorilla" study.

8. Change blindness

   • The inability to detect changes in a visual scene when those changes occur during a visual disruption.
   • Highlights the role of attention in perception and memory.
   • Commonly studied using film clips or images that change subtly.

9. Spotlight model of attention

   • Proposes that attention operates like a spotlight, illuminating certain areas of the visual field while leaving others in the dark.
   • Suggests that attention can be shifted quickly and flexibly across different locations.
   • Useful for understanding how we prioritize information in complex environments.

10. Feature integration theory

    • Suggests that attention is necessary to bind different features (color, shape, etc.) into a coherent perception of an object.
    • Proposes a two-stage process: pre-attentive (automatic feature detection) and attentive (integration of features).
    • Important for understanding how we perceive complex scenes and objects.