Problem 1. Where's your head at?
02 September 2021 16:46
Learning Goals:
• Why can we sometimes pay attention to different things at once and sometimes not?
○ Selective attention/divided attention?
• To what extent is it possible to attend to 2 stimuli simultaneously?
○ Can this be trained? (divided attention)
• What theories are there and how do they differ from each other?
• Is music/external stimuli always distracting/inhibiting?
• How is divided attention measured?
1A - Simons (2021): • Inattentional blindness --> the failure to notice unexpected objects/events when attention is focused
Inattentional blindness elsewhere
• Benefits of it;
○ Won't be overwhelmed by everything around you (like ADHD)
○ Distractions --> no focussing
• Dichotic listening task(Cherry, Moray, Treisman)
○ 2 different speech streams per ear, do a task focusing on one side, do not notice changes in the
other side
- e.g. switch to a different language
○ Only notice about 1/3 of the time
○ Only notice large change
- e.g. male to female voice
○ Cognitive deafness --> selective listening
○ Shows how attention can filter information away from our awareness when focussing
• Factors affecting 'noticing'
○ Similarity to 'focus' object
- More likely to notice gorilla if you are paying attention to people wearing black than white
- However even 'unique' items can go unnoticed
○ Effort put into attention demanding task
- e.g. tracking high speed or low speed passes
- More effort -> less noticing
- Reflects limited capacity of attention
○ Auditory distraction
- May induce failure to see
• Visual analogue of dichotic listening task (Neisser, Becklen)
○ Subjects view a video of two teams of players, white shirt and black shirts passing a ball overlapped
○ Were instructed to press a button every time the white team made a pass, meanwhile they would
not see a woman with a raincoat and umbrella walking through the scene
○ Criticism because they overlapped the images and the displays has transparent images so you
wouldn't be able to fully visualize what is happening
- As a result of this Simons and Chabris (1999) designed the Monkey Business Illusion which it
was all in one shot so that you could see more clearly what was happening
The greater the demands of attention, the less likely people are able to notice external events/objects
• Differences between people?
○ Mixed results
○ Some studies find greater working memory will increase chances of noticing unexpected events
- Others do not
- Sometimes WM indicates either great ability to focus and ignore but also to notice
• Mistaken intuitions
○ A lot of people believe they would spot something unexpected, 90%
○ Our experiences mislead us
- We don't confront ourselves with things we have missed in the same way that after the
gorilla experiment you confront that you missed something, therefore you would believe that
usually you don't miss these events
- Drivers don’t notice how distracted they are when they talk on the phone, so they believe
that they can drive just as well even though they can't
• What to do about inattentional blindness?
Maximize attention by reducing distractions, especially under conditions where failure to pay
2.1 Thinking and Remembering Page 1
02 September 2021 16:46
Learning Goals:
• Why can we sometimes pay attention to different things at once and sometimes not?
○ Selective attention/divided attention?
• To what extent is it possible to attend to 2 stimuli simultaneously?
○ Can this be trained? (divided attention)
• What theories are there and how do they differ from each other?
• Is music/external stimuli always distracting/inhibiting?
• How is divided attention measured?
1A - Simons (2021): • Inattentional blindness --> the failure to notice unexpected objects/events when attention is focused
Inattentional blindness elsewhere
• Benefits of it;
○ Won't be overwhelmed by everything around you (like ADHD)
○ Distractions --> no focussing
• Dichotic listening task(Cherry, Moray, Treisman)
○ 2 different speech streams per ear, do a task focusing on one side, do not notice changes in the
other side
- e.g. switch to a different language
○ Only notice about 1/3 of the time
○ Only notice large change
- e.g. male to female voice
○ Cognitive deafness --> selective listening
○ Shows how attention can filter information away from our awareness when focussing
• Factors affecting 'noticing'
○ Similarity to 'focus' object
- More likely to notice gorilla if you are paying attention to people wearing black than white
- However even 'unique' items can go unnoticed
○ Effort put into attention demanding task
- e.g. tracking high speed or low speed passes
- More effort -> less noticing
- Reflects limited capacity of attention
○ Auditory distraction
- May induce failure to see
• Visual analogue of dichotic listening task (Neisser, Becklen)
○ Subjects view a video of two teams of players, white shirt and black shirts passing a ball overlapped
○ Were instructed to press a button every time the white team made a pass, meanwhile they would
not see a woman with a raincoat and umbrella walking through the scene
○ Criticism because they overlapped the images and the displays has transparent images so you
wouldn't be able to fully visualize what is happening
- As a result of this Simons and Chabris (1999) designed the Monkey Business Illusion which it
was all in one shot so that you could see more clearly what was happening
The greater the demands of attention, the less likely people are able to notice external events/objects
• Differences between people?
○ Mixed results
○ Some studies find greater working memory will increase chances of noticing unexpected events
- Others do not
- Sometimes WM indicates either great ability to focus and ignore but also to notice
• Mistaken intuitions
○ A lot of people believe they would spot something unexpected, 90%
○ Our experiences mislead us
- We don't confront ourselves with things we have missed in the same way that after the
gorilla experiment you confront that you missed something, therefore you would believe that
usually you don't miss these events
- Drivers don’t notice how distracted they are when they talk on the phone, so they believe
that they can drive just as well even though they can't
• What to do about inattentional blindness?
Maximize attention by reducing distractions, especially under conditions where failure to pay
2.1 Thinking and Remembering Page 1
