Chapter 5: Paying Attention

Automaticity

When an activity or action becomes a mental reflex

space vs object

with neglect syndrome, patients ignore all things on the left side of the space, but once attention is locked, we can move an object grasping their attention to the left side of the field and they'll still be paying attention to it.

Spotlight Attention

-Orienting system is needed to disengage attention from one target and shift attention to a new target -Alerting system is responsible for achieving and maintaining an alert state in the brain -Executive system controls voluntary actions

preservation error

Card example: people with damage could not switch to sorting by color after sorting by shape.

Practice

Diminishes resource demand

limited-capacity system

Expectation-based priming reveals that there are costs when someone is misled (can't listen to two messages at the same time)

Automatic tasks

Highly familiar and don't cause any flexibility.

Change Blindness

Observers' inability to detect changes in scenes they're looking directly at.

Response selector

Like a traffic cop deciding which processes go forward at any moment in time

Executive control

Mechanism setting goals and priorities, choosing strategies, and controlling the sequence of cognitive processes. Needed when you don't want to do something in accordance with habit

Dichotic Listening

Participants wear headphones and hear one input in the left and a different one in the right. They are told to pay attention to the attended channel. And to ignore the unattended channel. Although unaware of the semantic content, participants know the PHYSICAL attributes of the unattended channel (was it a male or female, was it a voice or instrument)

Misled, neutral, and primed conditions

Primed conditions in both the low and high validity tests yielded faster RT's than the misled and neutral ones, which were both the same. Though, high validity works better than low validity because it causes a warm up effect and an expectation effect.

Divided attention

The effort to divide your focus between multiple tasks or multiple inputs

Misled differences (Expectation-based priming)

There was a cost in the misled conditions of the high validity condition and this cost was MUCH greater than in the low validity condition.

Shadowing

To make sure participants payed attention in the dichotic listening exercise, the attended channel contained a recording of someone speaking, and then they participants repeat it word for word. It's initially challenging, but becomes easier after a minute of practice. Participants cannot repeat what the unattended channel said and have a hard time remembering anything about it at all.

Unilateral Neglect Syndrome

Usually a result of damage to the parietal cortex. Patients ignore all inputs coming from one side of the body. Only shave half their face, for example. Usually in the right parietal lobe, so they ignore the left side.

Late selection hypothesis

all inputs receive relatively complete analysis, and the selection occurs after the analysis is finished.

Inattentional blindness

caused by the fact that the participants were not expecting any shapes to appear and were not in any way prepared for them.

Goal neglect

failing to organize their behavior in a way that moves them toward their goal.

Controlled tasks

novel, not yet practiced. Continually vary in their demands (not possible to have a routine yet)

Filter

shields us from potential distractors. This only works for distractors we KNOW about. So, something new is something we have to learn to filter.

Spatial attention

the ability to focus on a particular position in space and, thus, to be better prepared for any stimulus that appears in that position. There appears a cost of being misled in this condition as well.

Early selection hypothesis

the attended input is privileged from the start, so that the unattended input receives little (maybe no) analysis and is therefore never perceived