Attention has been an increasingly tricky subject within psychology to investigate over the past few centuries, and as advancements have been made, so have the discoveries of more systems within attention itself. It has been described as an enhancement of the perception of certain stimuli in the environment (Shapiro, 1993), with studies having their focus on, of course, human attention. Despite the attentional system’s complexity, it has very clear limitations that have been made apparent and examinable through recent studies. A fairly recent observed phenomenon is known as the attentional blink; a form of selective attention that makes subsequent relevant items in a brief sequence undetectable. Various studies have taken a look at this, and as will soon be discovered, there is much more at work here than simply what is decided to be processed and what isn’t.
The topic of interest here falls under selective attention, which, as the name suggests, involves selecting which stimulus to be focused on. An example of this in everyday life may be searching for someone in a crowd by what clothing they are wearing, or students in school tuning out while daydreaming. With selective attention, stimuli that aren’t attended to are of course not detected. This links to the bottleneck idea, where there is a clear capacity of information that can be processed at one time. These limitations were investigated and shown to be present when the results of dual-task paradigms proved difficult (Chun, Potter, 2000). This is also very relevant for both visual and auditory information (Vul, Nieuwenstein, Kanwisher, 2008). When stimuli are being selectively attended to, they are processed significantly faster and more efficiently (Hsiao, O’Shaughnessy, Jo...
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...auditory blink, which of course, showed no cross-over. However, as we have seen, interference within systems was very apparent. In the visual attentional blink, the focus of discussion, the root of the interference issue was put to the process of task-switching. This involved the large resource consumption required to switch the tasks of focusing on targets and ignoring distractors (Chun, Potter, 2005). Of course, the extremely small amount of time given to do so also played a very large role in this.
In conclusion, we have seen the striking phenomenon of the attentional blink at work, as the limitations of selective attention have difficulty disengaging and re-engaging their focus on targets in 200-500ms. There have been various theories as to the mechanism of the attentional blink, as well as hypotheses regarding bottlenecks and auditory factors being supported.
A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
Although correlation does not equal causation, we can conclude that similar cognitive processes, such as interference and automaticity, have influenced the results in our experiment. This can be expressed by the data and in identifying and saying aloud/reading a simple number compared to quantifying simple numbers. The cognitive load of reading familiar or smaller words is lower than that of counting, thus creating perchance a longer reaction time. In the experiment conducted in class as well as the one conducted by Stroop, the issue of divided attention may have been a great factor in interference or prolonged reaction time in the conditions. Psychological refractory period which states that the response to a second stimulus is slowed down by the first stimulus being processed; this can be a cause for the finding of increased reaction time when conflicting information is given. Attention may unconsciously be given to the less complex task, which is reading/identifying, and counting the main and more complex task may be interfered by the simpler stimulus. The expectation of having a longer reaction time when conducting the incongruent task was referenced back to the Stroop effect due to the similar implications of identifying and saying aloud the color presented in the print of the color descriptive word (Stroop,
people who are in a line. The 5 people all have a ball; all the balls
Many would remark that multitasking is a skill that can be trained like all others. However, a lot of neuroscience has went into proving that multitasking is a myth altogether. The article “The Myth of Multitasking” is written by Nancy K. Napier for Psychology today is here to debunk the myth of the brain’s capability to multitask. The article states that the brain is incapable of doing two things at once. Instead, the way that we fool ourselves into thinking that we can multitask is how quickly our brain switches from one task to another. Our brains can’t perform tasks simultaneously as our focus is a narrow beam. So, to compensate for this, our brain switches between these two tasks very quickly, almost as if we are doing them at the same
Processing capacity is a very broad and flexible category according to many researchers. In fact, the quote above mentioned suggests that we often fail to notice things that happen just in front of us (unexpected events that are often salient) either because we were completely absorbed by something else or because we had so many things to do at the same time that we couldn’t pay attention to it. We have all at least once failed to see a friend who was waving at us while eating in the cafeteria or walking in a crowded street. The primary question that we should ask ourselves is: how many things can we attend at the same time? The truth is that we didn’t perceive this friend because of a phenomenon called “inattentional blindness”. The problem is that the richness of our visual experience leads us to believe that our visual representation will include and preserve the same amount of detail (Levin et al 2000). In this paper we’ll see the different theories of inattentional blindness, and the classical theories demonstrating this paradigm.
Humans are creatures that spent more time looking for the distraction from work than actually working. Humans are naturally easily distracted and need something to help us focus on the tasks at hand. Two stories that clearly reflect this are "Stopping by Woods on a snowy evening" by Robert Frost and "Effort by Distraction" by Josephine Miles. In Frost 's story, it shows how humans are easily distracted so we need something so push us forward the goal in mind. Mile 's poem supports this by explaining on how humans focus more on trying to distract themselves than actually working and paying attention. My artifact extends the meaning of my poem because it analyzes how humans are naturally lazy and how we need to push ourselves to continue working.
In his 2002 review, Ronald A. Rensink, divides the study of change detection into three phases (Rensink, 2002). The first phase, from mid-1950s to mid-1960s, investigates change detection when change occurs in a saccade. Whilst change detection was considered an easy task at the time, the studies showed poor results proving that detection is not a simple task after all. In the second phase he combines the studies on limits of detection of gap contingent changes with those on visual integration as a basis of limited capacity visual short-term memory. And finally, in the third phase, Rensink emphasizes the idea that change detection involves mechanisms central to the way humans perceive the world.
A recent neurobiological approach to understanding consciousness, at least on a perceptual level, has involved the study of the phenomenon of blindsight. Damage to areas of the visual cortex often result in complete or partial blindness. Although the eye itself is undamaged, patients report an inability to detect any light input in part of (or the entire) visual field. However, experiments regularly show that somehow, visual cues are processed. Visual inputs presented to the blind field affect the patient's response to stimulus in the normal visual field. Reaction times to stimuli are affected as well as the interpretation of the stimuli. A visual cues presented in the blind field may suggest a certain interpretation of an ambiguous stimuli. For example, the interpretation of the word "bank", presented as an auditory cue, differs depending on whether the word "river" or "money" is presented to the blind field, even though the patient does not...
A popular subject within psychology is that of selective attention, particularly visual, auditory or visual and auditory attention (Driver, 2001). There are many theories of visual and auditory attention that provide us with a greater understanding of the ways in which humans attend to different stimuli (Driver, 2001), such as Broadbent’s (1958) filter theory of attention, for example. This essay will compare and contrast theories of visual and auditory attention, as well as discussing how well these theories explain how we attend to objects. The essay will consist of three auditory attention theories of Broadbent’s filter theory, Treisman’s (1964) attenuation theory, and Deutsch and Deutsch’s (1963) late selection model of attention; and two models of visual attention known as the spotlight model, such as Treisman and Gelade’s (1980) feature integration model, and the zoom-lens model of visual attention (see Styles, 2006). Broadbent’s (1958) filter theory of attention proposes that there is a filter device between sensory identification and short-term memory.
Macleod and Mathews (1991) induced attentional biases within a laboratory setting to determine that a ca...
Though the experiment shows that attention is vital for change detection, we should consider the size/ impact of the change in the environment. If the change to an environment is small, would it result in the change being detected? Do providing little clues draw attention effectively to where the change is being made? In support of this argument, Rensink (1997) showed that even with small clues, if the clue is not directed properly then detecting change will not have an effect. A proposal of Rensink is that the absence of attention will cause visual contents to be missed. On the other hand, Simon and Levin (1998) suggest that a person could miss things happening in their environment if his or her attention is occupied by something
Helminen, T.M., Kaasinen, S.M., Hietanen, J.K. (2011). Eye contact and arousal: The effects of stimulus duration. Biological Psychology, 88, 124-130.
In Betty White’s opening monologue to Saturday Night Live, she said, “I didn’t know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time. I would never say the people on it are losers, but that’s only because I’m polite.” Originally intended for the use of students at Harvard University in 2004, Facebook grew exponentially to be an online phenomenon in the years following. In 2006, it became accessible to anyone and everyone with internet connection. Aside from the advantages that give the site its popularity, creating a profile comes with a number of significant disadvantages inherit to online social networks. What do more than 500 million active users use their Facebook for? Communicating with long distance friends and spreading awareness of causes are common responses. Unfortunately, Facebook has it flaws, from limiting the privacy of relationships to creating a form of almost unmanageable bullying, making one reconsider their involvement and think, “do I really want my Facebook account?”
Did you know that the first few minutes of class is the only time a student listens to their teacher? A student listens to a 60-90 minute lectures from classroom to classroom for 200 school days. But a student cannot focus their attention for that long so they ended up losing their attention somewhere else. Someday, this may be a trouble to their parents. Students lacking concentration may cause failure in planning for their future.
The phenomenon of ‘Divided attention’ is the idea that an individual has the ability to divide their attention between two or more tasks (multi- tasking). Focused attention models such as Broadbent’s theory, Treisman’s theory and Deutsch and Deutsch model explains how all our inputs are focused on one task at a time, however it is clear from looking at everyday life that we are able to divide our attention, successfully being able to complete more than one task at the same time.