Attention: Mental

Concentration at Play
Naveen Kashyap, PhD
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
Email: [email protected]
 Attention
The study of attention concerns primarily the cognitive resources and their
limitations. At any given time people have only a certain amount of mental energy
to devote to all the possible tasks and all the incoming information confronting
them. Attention is sometimes synonymously used with mental concentration.

Does people’s concentration level change with practice ?

Selective Attention
The term selective attention refers to the fact that we usually focus out
attention on one or a few tasks or events rather than on many. We mentally focus
our resources implies that we shut out (or atleast process less information from)
other competing tasks. As attention researcher Hal Pashle puts it
at any given moment [people’s] awareness encompasses only a tiny
proportion of the stimuli impinging on their sensory systems
Selective attention requires that we focus
attention more actively on some stimuli than on
others. This being the case what happens to
other information's. In order to study this
cognitive psychologists found a solution in the
dichotic listening task
DLT – involves a listener listening to
audiotapes over a set of headphones. On the
tapes are different messages recorded so as to
be heard simultaneously in opposite ears. The
participant is asked to shadow – “repeat aloud”
one of the messages. Information in the
messages are typically presented at a rapid rate
(150 wpm) requiring the shadowing to be
demanding. At the end of the task the
participants are asked to reveal what
information they have gathered from the
messages.
Filter Theory
Incoming messages
To explain the findings of DLT Broadbent
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
(1958) proposed the filter theory of
attention which states that there are limits
on how much information a person can
attend to at any given time. If the
Filter
information available at any given time
exceeds capacity, the person uses an
attentional filter to let some information
through and block the rest. The filter theory
is based on some physical (basic acoustic
in case of DLT) aspect of the attended
message (location, pitch, loudness etc)

Filter theory explains why so little of the meaning of the unattended message
can be recalled: The meaning from the unattended message is simply not
processed.
Does this imply that people can never pay
attention to two messages at once ?

Broardbent (1958) proposed that two messages

that contain little information or that information
slowly can be processed simultaneously.
Moray (1959) discovered the “Cocktail
Party Effect”: shadowing performance is
disrupted when one’s own name is embedded in
either the attended or the unattended ear. This
happened as “important materials” can
penetrate the filter setup to block unattended
messages. Pashler (1998) however reported - that
when not cued in advance to be vigilant only 33%
people ever noticed their names in DLT proving
that shadowing in “Filter theory” does not
always take 100% of ones attention.
 Anna Treisman (1960)
conducted a ear switching
experiment with the messages and
found the subject reported one or
more words from the unattended
ear. Treisman explained this
deviation of filter theory by
assuming that the participants were
attending the messages, in part,
based on their meaning.
Similar experimentation by
Wood & Cowan (1995) and
Conway, Cowan & Bunting (2001)
resulted in showing the messages
from the unattended ear was also
processed thus challenging the
“Filter Theory”
 Incoming
Attenuation Theory – Anna Treisman (1960) Messages
proposed a modified filter theory of attention
which she called “Attenuation Theory”. The
theory proposes that instead of being completely Level 1 Analysis
blocked away the messages from the unattended
Physical Properties
ear is processed for meaning with a “turned down (Pitch, Loudness)
volume”. Her theory can be explained as follows:
Incoming messages are subjected to three
kinds of Analysis. Some meaningful units (words of Level 2 Analysis
importance) are processed quite easily (e.g., one
Linguistic (Parsing as
name, Fire, Watch Out etc). Also the context of the
syllables + words)
word may also lower its threshold (e.g., The Dog
Chased the …. The word Cat is Primed).
Treisman (1964) believes that people
process only as much as is necessary to separate Level 3 Analysis
the attended from the unattended message Semantic (meaning of
messages)
Late Selection Theory – Proposed by Deutsch & Deutsch (1963)
and later modified by Norman (1968) the theory holds that
all messages are routinely processed for at least some
aspects of meaning – that selection of which response to attend to
happens “late” in processing. In continuation with the “Filter
Theory” this theory also describes a “bottleneck” but locates it later
in the processing, after certain aspects of the message is extracted.
A messages “importance” depends on many factors,
including its content and the personal significance of certain kinds
of content (name). Also relevant is the observer’s level of alertness.
At low levels of alertness (sleep) only important messages are
processed (new born crying) where as the opposite is true for high
level of alertness (television program too gets processed !!!)
 Stage 1
Multimode Theory – Johnston & Heinz Sensory representation
(1978) proposed the “multimode model”. In constructed
their view
attention is flexible system that allow
selection of one message over others at
Stage 2
several different points. They described three
stages of processing. Semantic representation
constructed
When messages are selected on the
basis of Stage 1 processing (early selection)
less capacity if required then if selected on
the basis of Stage 3 (late selection) which Stage 3
makes it harder Semantic + Sensory
representation enter
consciousness
Kahneman’s Model of Attention – Daniel
Kahneman (1973) proposed a model which
viewed attention as set of cognitive processes
for categorizing a recognizing stimuli. The more
complex the stimulus the harder the processing
and therefore more resources are engaged.
Essentially this model depicts the
allocation of mental resources to various
cognitive tasks. This allocation depends
on the extent and type of mental resource
available. The availability of mental
resource in turn depends on the level of
arousal/alertness. Level of arousal
however may be controlled by task’s
difficulty.
The allocation policy in the model
is affected by the individuals enduring
dispositions, momentary intentions and
evaluation of demands on one’s mental
capacity.
Schema Theory of Attention –
Ulric Neisser (1976) offered a very different conceptualization of
attention called Schema Theory.
he argues that we don’t filter, attenuate or forget unwanted
materials. Instead we never acquire it in the first place.. Attention is
like apple picking – the messages we attend to are like apples picked
from the trees and the unattended are those left behind on the tree. To
call the left behinds as filtered/attenuated is ridiculous.
Neisser and Becklen (1975) study
Inattentional blindness
Automaticity and the effects of practice
As we become well practiced doing something, that act takes less of our
attention to perform. A good example is typing. If one is skilled at typing he can
carry out typing fairly accurately and quickly and also carry out conversation with
someone besides

What effects the capacity any given task require ?

The answer to the above question can have two factors

(1) Task Difficulty
(2) Individuals familiarity with the task

Practice is believed to decrease the amount of mental effort a task requires thus
making it automatic
The Stroop Task – John Ridley Stroop (1935) used a famous
demonstration to show the effects of practice on the performance of
cognitive tasks
Stroop task presents participants with a
series of kolor bars (red, blue, green) or
kolor words (red blue green) printed in
conflicting kolors (the word red for
example may be printed with green ink).
Participants were asked to name as quickly
as possible, the ink kolor of each item in
the series.
According to Stroop (1935) the
difficulty stems from the following: Adult
literate participants have had so much
practice reading that the task requires little
attention and is performed rapidly. Thus
when confronted with items consisting of
words participants couldn’t help reading
them. This type of response –one that takes
little attention and effort and is hard to
inhabit – as “automatic”
 What exactly does it mean to perform a task automatically?

Snyder & Posner (1975) offered three criteria for cognitive

processing to be called“automatic processing” -
a) it must occur without “intention”
b) it must occur without involving “conscious awareness”
c) it must not interfere with “other mental activity”
A single number “pops out” against a
background of letters, no matter how many
letters are in the array.
What role does attention and automaticity play in
perception?
Anna Triesman investigated this
question and came up with the “feature
integration model”. The model proposes
that we perceive objects in two distinct
stages
a) pre attentive/automatic – we
register features of objects (kolor, shape etc)
b) attentive – here attention allows
to “glue” the features into a unified object.

Triesman & Schmidt (1982) in

an interesting study showed that when
attention is diverted/overloaded
participants make integration error
resulting in “illusory conjunctions”
Feature integration theory
Attentional Capture –
Visual search task often involves
“pop out” phenomenon in which certain
stimuli seem to jump off the page or
screen at the viewer, demanding
attention. Experimental psychologists
call this phenomenon “attentional
capture” by which they mean to imply
stimuli that “cause an involuntary shift of
attention”
Psychologists have defined
attentional capture to be a bottom up
phenomenon driven almost entirely by
properties of the stimuli rather than the
perceiver’s goal or objectives
Attention hypothesis of automatization
Works by Gordon Logan & Joseph Etherton (1994, 1996) propose
the attention hypothesis of automatization, which states that - attention is
needed during the practice phase of a task and determines what gets
learned during practice. Attention also determines what will be
remembered from the practice. Simply stated - “learning is a side effect of
attending: people will learn more about the things they attend to and
less about those which they don’t attend”.
The Psychological Refractory Period (PRP)
Psychological refractory period refers to the delay observed in execution of
the second of two tasks when it must be in close temporal succession with a prior
task
A general interpretation of the PRP effect assumes the presence
of a bottleneck when initiating response to stimuli. In simple
words –
if we detect a stimulus and are processing that
information while a second stimulus comes along we are unable
to attend to and process the second stimulus until the first
stimulus have finished processing, thus making our reaction
time longer. This extra reaction time is called the
“Psychological Refractory Period”. It is virtually impossible to
initiate two responses simultaneously. People can however
additional responses after the first one has been initiated.
 A very important question arose from Pashler’s (1993)
work regarding the placement of the bottleneck that caused PRP.
Pashler considered three distinct possibilities:
a) at the stage of presentation of the stimulus
b) at the stage in which a response is selected
c) at the stage of making a response
Pashler’s et.al (1993), working in the theory of Welford
(1952) [the person who coined the term psychological refractory
period] found evidence that retrieving information from memory
caused a bottleneck and disrupted attention to the second task.