A power point presentation of Attention and Consciousness from the book: Discovering Cognitive Psychology; 5th Edition

1. GROUP 4

2. “Attention is the taking possession of the
mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of
what seem several simultaneous possible
objects or trains of thoughts.. It implies
withdrawal from some things in order to deal
effectively with others.”
- William
James

3. • 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
• Includes both conscious and unconscious
processes
• Allows us to use our limited mental resources
judiciously.
• Dimming the lights on many stimuli form the
outside and the inside to highlight one that
interests us.

4. According to John Locke, consciousness is “the
perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.”
From the Latin phrase “conscius sibi” which means
“knowing with oneself”
Consciousness is the state of being awake and
aware of one’s surrounding.
Attention and Consciousness form two partially
overlapping sets

5. • Helps in monitoring our
interactions with the environment
• Assists us in linking our past and
present to give a sense of
continuity of experience
• Helps us in controlling and
planning for our future actions

6. Processing information that exist at the
preconscious level of awareness.
• STORED MEMORIES
• SENSATIONS

7. PRIMING occurs when a recognition of certain
stimuli is affected by prior presentation of the same
or similar stimuli.
• Positive Priming
• Negative Priming
• Visual Priming
• Aural Priming

8. Sometimes, pulling preconscious
information into consciousness is not
easy.
Tip-of-the-Tongue phenomenon

10. • Concealed from consciousness
• Unintentional
• Consume few attentional resources

11. Characteristics Controlled Processes Automatic Processes
Amount of intentional
effort
Require intentional effort Require little or no
intentional effort
Degree of conscious
awareness
Require full conscious
awareness
Generally occur outside
of conscious awareness
although some may be
available for
consciousness
Use of attentional
resources
Consume many
attentional resources
Consume negligible
attentional resources
Type of processing Performed serially Performed by parallel
processing
Speed of processing Relatively time-
consuming
Relatively fast
Relative novelty of tasks Novel and unpractised
tasks
Familiar and highly
practised tasks
Level of processing Relatively high levels of
cognitive processing
Relatively low levels of
cognitive processing
Difficulty of tasks Usually difficult tasks Usually easy tasks
Process of acquisition With sufficient practise, many routine and relatively

12. AUTOMATIZATION is the process by which
a procedure changes from being highly conscious
to being relatively automatic.
HOW?
By PRACTISE

13. A widely accepted view of automatization has been
that during the course of practise, implementation
of the various steps become more efficient
People consolidate various discrete steps into a
single operation.

14. INSTANCE THEORY
Automatization occurs because we gradually
accumulate knowledge about specific responses to
specific stimuli.
Instance theory explain specific responses to
specific stimuli while the prevailing view explain
more general responses involving automatization.

15. 1. MISTAKES - errors in choosing an object or in
specifying a means of achieving it.
2. SLIPS - errors in carrying out an intended
means for reaching an object.
1. When we must deviate from a routine and
automatic processes inappropriately override
intentional, controlled processes
2. When we are interrupted

16. Type of Error Description of Error
Capture Error When in need to deviate from a routine in a familiar
surrounding but we fail to pay attention and to
regain control of the process AP capture our
behavior.
Omission* An interruption may cause us to skip a step or two
in doing the routine
Perseveration* After an automatic procedure has been completed,
one or more step may be repeated.
Description Error A description leads to performing the correct action
on the wrong object.
Data-driven Error Incoming information may end up overriding the
intended variables in automatic action sequence.
Associative-
activation Error
Strong association may trigger the wrong routine
Loss-of-activation
Error
Activation of routine may be insufficient to carry it
through completion

17. HOW CAN WE MINIMIZE THE POTENTIAL
FOR NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF
SLIPS?
If we receive appropriate feedback from the
environment particularly the kind of feedback
which involves forcing function. Forcing functions
are physical constraints that make it difficult or
impossible to carry out an automatic behavior that
may lead to a slip.

18. HABITUATION involves our becoming accustomed
to a stimulus so that we gradually pay less and
less attention to it.
DISHABITUATION involves a change in a familiar
stimulus which prompts us to start noticing the
stimulus again.
SENSORY ADAPTATION is a lessening of
attention to a stimulus that is not subject to
conscious control.

19. ADAPTATION HABITUATION
Not accessible to conscious
control
Accessible to conscious
control
Tied closely to stimulus
intensity
Not tied very close
Unrelated to the number,
length, and recency of prior
exposures
Tied very closely to the
number, length, and recency
of prior exposures

20. 1. Stimulus internal variation
2. Subject arousal
AROUSAL is a degree of psychological excitation,
responsivity, and readiness for action, relative to a
baseline.
HOW? In terms of:
• rate
• Blood pressure
• EEG patterns
• Neural responses

22. 1. Signal detection and vigilance
2. Selective attention
3. Divided attention
4. Search

23. FUNCTION DESCRIPTION
Signal
detection
and
vigilance
Waiting for signals to show
Selective
Attention
Choosing signals to attend to
Divided
Attention
Engaging in more than one task
Search Seeking out

24. FOUR POSSIBLE OUTCOMES
Hit
Miss
False Alarm
Correct Rejection
SIGNAL DETECT A
SIGNAL
DO NOT DETECT A
SIGNAL
Present Hit Miss
Absent False Alarm Correct Rejection

25. Covered in the: 1) context of attention, 2) context
of perception, and 3) context of memory
1. Whether one is paying enough attention to
perceive objects that are there
2. Whether one is able to perceive faint signals
that may or may not be beyond one’s
perceptual range
3. Whether one indicates one has or has not been
exposed to a stimulus before

26. Vigilance - 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
• Needed in settings where a given stimulus
occurs only rarely but requires immediate
attention
• Highly localized and strongly influenced by
expectation
• Involves the speed and accuracy of detecting a
target stimulus

27. • Scan the environment for particular features
• Whereas vigilance involves passively waiting
for a signal stimulus to appear, search involves
actively seeking out the target
Distracters
• Nontarget stimuli that divert our attention away
from the target stimuli
• Can cause false alarm
Search

28. 2 KINDS OF SEARCH
1. Feature search
• When we can look for some distinctive features
of a target we simply scan the environment for
those features
2. Conjunction search
• We look for a particular
combination of features

29. • Each of us has mental map for representing
the given set of features for a particular item
(shape, size, color features)
• During feature searches we monitor the
relevant feature map for the presence of any
activation in the visual field
• During conjunction searches, we can simply
use the map of features, we must conjoin two
or more features into an object representation
at a particular location

30. As the similarity between target and distracter
increases, so does the difficulty in detecting the
target stimuli
Factors influencing search
1. DEGREE OF SIMILARITY - Similarity between
the target and the distracters
2. DEGREE OF DISPARITY - Similarity among
distracters

31. All searches involve two consecutive stages
• Parallel stage – simultaneous activation of all
the potential targets
• Serial stage – sequential evaluation of each of
the activated elements

32. • Movement-filter – can direct attention to stimuli
with a common movement characteristics
• Movement can both enhance and inhibit visual
search

33. Selective Attention
the process by which a person can selectively
pick out one message from a mixture of messages
occurring simultaneously.
BASIC PARADIGMS
• Cocktail Party Problem (Colin Cherry, 1953)
- the process of tracking one conversation in
the face of the distraction of other
conversations.
• Shadowing
- listening to two different messages but are
able to follow only one message & ignore the
other.

34. • Binaural Presentation
- Presenting the same two messages or
sometimes just one message to BOTH
ears simultaneously.
• Dichotic Presentation
- Presenting different message to EACH ear.

35. • Distinctive sensory characteristics
of the target speaker’s speech
• Sound intensity
• Location of the sound source

36. • Broadbent’s Model
- we filter information right after it is registered
at the sensory level.

37. • Moray’s Selective Filter Model
- The selective filter blocks out
most information at the
sensory level. But some highly
salient messages are so
powerful that they burst
through the filtering
mechanism.

38. • Treisman’s Attenuation Model
- We preattentively analyze the physical
properties of a stimulus (stimuli with target
properties)
- We analyze whether a given stimulus has a
pattern, such as speech or music
- We sequentially evaluate the incoming
messages, assigning appropriate meanings to
the selected stimuli messages

39. • Deutsch and Deutsch’s Late Filter Model
- the signal-blocking filter occurs later in the
process. It has its effects after sensory
analysis. It occurs after some perceptual and
conceptual analysis of input had taken place.

40. • Multimode Theory
-Attention is flexible
INFORMATION PROCESSING OCCURS IN 3
STAGES
1. The individual constructs sensory representation of
stimuli.
2. The individual constructs semantic representations.
3. The representations of stages 1 & 2 become
conscious

41. • Neisser’s Synthesis
2 Processes Governing Attention
•Preattentive (rapid, automatic, parallel)
•Attentive processes (controlled, occur later,
serial)
• Help to explain how we can perform more than
one attention - demanding task at a time.
• We have attentional resources specific to a
given modality

42. Listen to
music
Listen to
the news
station
Concentrate on
writing
Having difficulty
doing task 2 & the
activity selected
simultaneously
Auditor
y
Visual
Listening to
music
Writing
Wouldn’t pose
serious attentional
difficulties

43. 1. Overall arousal
2. Specific interest in a target task and stimuli,
compared with interest in distracters
3. Nature of the task
4. Amount of practice in performing a given task or set
of tasks
5. Stage of processing at which attentional demands
are needed

44. • By John Ridley Stroop (1935)
• Demonstrates the psychological difficulty in selectively
attending the color of the ink and trying to ignore the
word that is printed with the ink of that color

45. • Because most other adult & for you, reading is now an
automatic process. It is not readily subject to your
conscious control
You find it difficult intentionally to refrain from reading
and instead to concentrate on identifying the colour of the
ink, disregarding the word printed in that ink colour.

47. Is attention a function
of the entire brain, or
is if a function of
discrete attention-
governing modules in
the brain?

48. 1. Alertingttttttiing
2. Orienting
3. Executive attention
THREE SUBFUNCTIONS OF ATTENTION

49. • An attentional dysfunction in which participants
ignore the half of their visual field that is
contralateral to the hemisphere of the brain that
has a lesion.
• Due to unilateral lesions in the parietal lobes.

50. • Anterior attention system – during task requiring
awareness/attention for action
• Posterior attention system – during task involving
visuospatial attention

51. EVENT-RELATED-POTENTIALS (ERPs) indicate
minute changes in electrical activity in response to
various stimuli.

52. This approach evaluates changes in
attention and consciousness associated with
various chemicals, hormones, and even
CNS stimulants and depressants.

53. Antony Marcel (1983)
• Participants had to classify series of words into
various categories
• Primes where words with two meanings such
as palm followed by target word (tree or hand)
• Task outline:
Prime – PALM
Target – TREE
- If the participant was consciously aware of
seeing the word “palm”, the mental pathway for
only one meaning was activated
- If the word “palm” was presented so briefly that
the person was unaware of seeing the word,
both meanings of the word appeared to be
activated

54. 1. Respective roles of structures and
processes.
2. Relation between biology and behavior.
3. Validity of causal inferences vs ecological
validity.

55. PAM
NIE
GDI