Focused attention and visual search
, Introduction to Attention
• What is attention? Actually, it is not that easy to define (although it
tends to be quite intuitive).
• The most effective way of conceptualising attention stands on the
observation that there is a vast flow of sensory information at any given
moment that cannot all be processed at a cognitive level, and so must
be filtered in some way to allow you to complete your goals
o Attention is perhaps a system to prioritise some of that
information over the rest so that only a small part will receive
various levels of cognitive processing
• Attention is limited. You have seen this in your workshop (e.g. the
attentional blink) but it can also be seen with a number of other
paradigms including inattentional blindness
o Simons and Chabris (1999) showed that even a highly
unexpected event (a gorilla) can be missed when individuals
have their attention directed at another task. For example, when
participants were completing a more difficult task they were
more likely to miss the gorilla than if they were completing a
simpler task. This suggests that attention is a finite resource that
we distribute between tasks we want to complete.
Early studies in auditory attention and the question of the
timing of selection
• The cocktail party phenomenon
o One of the striking examples of how effective attention selection
is can be seen by the Cocktail Party problem (Cherry, 1953).
In a cocktail party (or any other kind of gathering with multiple
people and multiple conversations going on – this was the
1950s after all) an observer is able to focus in on a single
discussion while ignoring the numerous other discussions. In
fact, we can also move in and out from discussions fairly easily.
o How can we achieve that?
o Researchers (e.g., Cherry) have attempted to study this
question using the dichotic listening task:
▪ In such a task a participant is asked to wear headphones
and is presented with two independent audio streams to
the different ears.
▪ Typically, the participant can be asked to monitor a single
stream (and ignore the other stream) for a particular
target (e.g., fruits).
▪ In a version of the task called Shadowing, participants are
asked to repeat out loud (shadow) the target stream.
o Using this task Cherry (1953) reported that participants can
perform the task accurately as long as there is a physical
difference between the two streams: that is, one is in a low pitch
whereas the other is in high pitch; one is spoken by a woman
the other is spoken by a man and so forth.
, Introduction to Attention
• What is attention? Actually, it is not that easy to define (although it
tends to be quite intuitive).
• The most effective way of conceptualising attention stands on the
observation that there is a vast flow of sensory information at any given
moment that cannot all be processed at a cognitive level, and so must
be filtered in some way to allow you to complete your goals
o Attention is perhaps a system to prioritise some of that
information over the rest so that only a small part will receive
various levels of cognitive processing
• Attention is limited. You have seen this in your workshop (e.g. the
attentional blink) but it can also be seen with a number of other
paradigms including inattentional blindness
o Simons and Chabris (1999) showed that even a highly
unexpected event (a gorilla) can be missed when individuals
have their attention directed at another task. For example, when
participants were completing a more difficult task they were
more likely to miss the gorilla than if they were completing a
simpler task. This suggests that attention is a finite resource that
we distribute between tasks we want to complete.
Early studies in auditory attention and the question of the
timing of selection
• The cocktail party phenomenon
o One of the striking examples of how effective attention selection
is can be seen by the Cocktail Party problem (Cherry, 1953).
In a cocktail party (or any other kind of gathering with multiple
people and multiple conversations going on – this was the
1950s after all) an observer is able to focus in on a single
discussion while ignoring the numerous other discussions. In
fact, we can also move in and out from discussions fairly easily.
o How can we achieve that?
o Researchers (e.g., Cherry) have attempted to study this
question using the dichotic listening task:
▪ In such a task a participant is asked to wear headphones
and is presented with two independent audio streams to
the different ears.
▪ Typically, the participant can be asked to monitor a single
stream (and ignore the other stream) for a particular
target (e.g., fruits).
▪ In a version of the task called Shadowing, participants are
asked to repeat out loud (shadow) the target stream.
o Using this task Cherry (1953) reported that participants can
perform the task accurately as long as there is a physical
difference between the two streams: that is, one is in a low pitch
whereas the other is in high pitch; one is spoken by a woman
the other is spoken by a man and so forth.
