Attention

• acts as a processor, copes with limited capacity of the Brain

• facilitates stimulus detection & perception

• facilitates thought & memory

• prepares one for Action!

Capturing Attention

• Either Voluntary (Endogenous) or Involuntary (exogenous)

• Different area of the Brain are activated when attention is endogenous or exogenous

• Endogenous ~ frontal lobe
• Exogenous ~temporal lobe

Selective (process important info)

• focus on relevant info by filtering out irrelevant info
• enables full processing of attended info
• voluntary focusing in specific input can be widened or narrowed. (E.g H made of a's)

Focused ( filter unwanted info)

Divided (attend to multiple tasks)

Attention Theories

Bottleneck Theory

Filter Theories

Capacity models

Perceptual load theory

• in pre-attentive stage, object features are analysed individually and attention 'binds' these features together to form a percept.

Stimulus (apple) ~ pre-attend (-curved, red, stalk) ~ focus attention (combine features) ~ Perceive!

Bottleneck Theory (Broadbent)

• Brain has limited capacity so filtering occurs early on based on physical characteristics.
• suggest nothing pertaining to meaning is processed.
• However Treisman found attention can be switched to unattended info such as 'cocktail effect' when upon hearing your name you attend to another conversation.

A ~ investigate how we focus our attention

P ~ pp's given dichotic listening task, different messages presented to each ear, pp's asked to repeat one.

F ~ physical attrubutes of unattended message detected, but little to none of the content

C ~ we can only focus on one message!

• Theory suggests nothing about meaning is processed

HOWEVER, Treisman found that we can shift our attention to something previously unattended if something i.e our NAME grabs our attention. 'cocktail effect'.