11.1: Attention- Deciding What to Dedicate Cognitive Resources To

What We Attend To

Attention is our ability to focus on certain aspects of our environment at the exclusion of others. Despite this, we can be distracted, or when one stimulus interferes with our attending to another. So how do we choose what to attend to? Baddeley (1996) proposed that attention is controlled by what he called the central executive. It tells us where to focus our attention and can even home in on specific aspects of a stimulus such as the tone in a speaker’s voice, color in someone’s face, a noxious smell, or peculiar taste.

We can even use selective attention to voluntarily focus on specific sensory input from our environment (Freiwald & Kanwisher, 2004). As such, we might choose to focus on an aspect of a professor’s lecture when it is interesting but begin paying attention more to people walking by in the hallway if it becomes boring and dry.

Our ability to focus our attention and not become distracted by outside stimuli is a function of our processing capacity — how much information we can handle, and perceptual load — how difficult a task is. Low-load tasks use up only a small amount of our processing capacity while high-load tasks use up much more. Lavie’s load theory of attention (Lavie et al., 2004) posits that we can attend to task-irrelevant stimuli since only some of our cognitive resources have been used when engaged in low-load tasks, but high load tasks do not leave us any resources to process other stimuli.

Before moving on, check the following out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo(opens in new tab)

Issues with Attention

Did you count the number of passes correctly? Likely not, and if this is true, it is due to the phenomena of inattentional blindness or when we miss a stimulus clearly present in our visual field when our attention is focused on a task (Simons & Chabris, 1999). In the video, you were presented with 2, three-person basketball teams who were passing the ball to other members of their team. One team wore white shirts and the other black. The participant had to count the number of times members of one of the two teams passed the ball to other team members, all while ignoring the other team. During this, a person wearing a gorilla suit walks through the basketball game, stopping to turn in the direction of the camera and thump its chest. Only half of the participants see the gorilla walk through. Did you?

Visit the Invisible Gorilla website to learn more about this study: http://theinvisiblegorilla.com(opens in new tab)

Two other types of blindness are worth mentioning too, and not in relation to problems in the visual sensory system. First, repetition blindness is when we experience a reduction in the ability to perceive repeated stimuli if flashed rapidly before our eyes. Say for example a series of numbers are flashed in rapid succession and during this string, the number 3 is flashed four times in a row. You may recall only seeing 3 one time, not four. Is it because we cannot visually separate the numbers? No. If the same experiment was repeated with letters, and in the midst of a string of letters you saw R r, you would believe only one R/r was presented to you.

Second, change blindness occurs when two pictures are flashed before our eyes in rapid succession. If the second picture differs slightly from the first, you will not see the difference as well as you could if presented side-by-side. The effect is stronger when the change is not in the central portion of the picture but in a peripheral area.

Can We Divide Our Attention?

So, can we successfully divide our attention or focus on more than one stimulus at a time? Results of several experiments show that it is possible to successfully divide our attention for tasks that we have practiced numerous times, but as the task becomes more difficult this ability quickly declines (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977). Of course, dividing our attention comes with risks, especially where driving and texting are concerned. Finley, Benjamin, & McCarley (2014) found that people can anticipate the costs of multitasking, but do not believe they are personally vulnerable to the risks compared to other people.

The Importance of Attention for Learning

Before moving on I hope you can see why attention is important to learning. Consider that a dog must hear the bell which leads to salivation (recall that the bell has become a CS because it was associated with the US of food). For the animal to ever learn the association (CS-NS), it must be paying attention. One of the limits of observational learning is that the organism needs to attend to the model. If it is not, then the model’s behavior will never be imitated later. Observational learning is important to respondent and operant conditioning as well. If we do well on our test and our parents say, ‘Great job,’ though the comment is a PR, if we do not pay attention to it from the start, we will not yield its reinforcing effect.

Attention is relevant to all three learning models discussed in this class. Think of it another way. If your boss is showing you how to use the new cash register and your mind is wandering and thinking about your big date that night, you will not learn how to use the machine, and likely frustrate your boss. This does not imply you are intellectually unable to learn how to use the cash register, only that in this moment, you are not paying him or her any attention.