Does the Concept of Negative Priming Contribute to Our Understanding of Selective Attention?

Attention is thought to be selective-focused on one subject at a time. Traditionally, it has been assumed that automatic processing is involuntary, it does not require attention, and is relatively fast; whereas, controlled processing is voluntary, does require attention, and is relatively slow. We can conclude from this that the more we repeat a certain material or tasks the more it becomes automatic and effortless to us.

Attention is considered to be a core cognitive process, it refers to how people actively process specific information in the environment. Attention refers to how people select from information and stimuli in the environment, facilitating processing of some of the stimuli and inhibiting processing of others. "Everyone knows what attention is, it is the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought...It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state. “This definition of attention was proposed by psychologist William James (1890). This review will focus on literature that gives explanation to selective attention. Selective attention refers to the process where a person is able to select out of many stimuli and focus on the one they want and ignore other stimuli.

Respondent conditioning occurs when a neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus. The unconditioned stimulus elicits an unconditioned response, such

In the novel The Invisible Gorilla: How our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, a deeper way of how the mind works is shown. The authors explain what they call the “illusion of attention” by providing experiments and illustrations. The message being passed is that we as humans might think we are always aware of our surroundings, but we actually miss what is right in front of us. People usually focus on one thing at a time, therefore the unexpected goes unnoticed. The book explains how the brain only focuses on the object or area you are concentrating on, making you “blind” to everything else. Many experiments were held to prove to the readers that our intuition deceives us.

The results of Roediger and McDermott’s experiment were very significant. The participants recalled the critical distractor words 40% of the time compared to 14% recall of the normal distractor words. When they

Selection. Selection is defined in the book as the following “The process of attending to a stimulus.” (Floyd, pg. 109) I have watched this video over and over before writing this paper, but the first time I watched it nothing really stood out to me besides

In the short video of “Awesome Ball Girl”, there is a young ball girl working in the field that makes such a great catch, most professionals would not have been able to make. At the start of the video you would think that you are about to see a home run after a great hit, but my eyes were drawn elsewhere; just like the crowd and two teams. This shows the first stage in the perception process: selection. Selection occurs when one or more of your senses are stimulated, where your mind and body help you choose what stimuli to attend to (Floyd 109). Of my five senses, this video affected my vision and my hearing since I was watching a screen; more

This was achieved by presenting central cues, indicating the position of the target letter thus increasing focus. Through these experiments they found that when a subject is in a diffuse attention state (unfocussed) SOD do cause attentional capture and increase reaction time. However, if the subject was presented with a cue this same increase in reaction time was not observed. This led them to conclude that attentional capture from SOD is not automatic and instead propose a priority based visual attention system. In 2006 Neo and Chua conducted research which built upon Yantis and Jonides’ to further demonstrate effects of attentional capture on reaction time. They investigated whether sporadic use of the SOD increased the effect of attentional capture as well as investigated whether maintaining the same position for the target letter decreased reaction times. They found that SOD attentional capture did affect reaction times and unlike in Yantis and Jonides’ experiment they concluded SOD did trigger an automaticity response when used

Early studies have widely researched attention with selective processing (Driver, 2001). Broadbent (1958) filter theory of attention states that certain information does not require focal attention. It is based on certain stimulus attributes such as colour and shape (Friedenberg, 2012). A previous study carried out by Treisman and Schmidt (1982) proposes that when attention is diverted from a display of several figures, the participants incorrectly combine the features of colour and shape therefore increases the illusory conjunctions portrayed by the participants (Tsal, 1989). Another study by Shaw (1978) found that reaction time of participant to identify targets varied with the probability that a target would appear in a particular display location. These results indicate that different amounts of attention towards the targets are distributed to different positions in the visual field. However, Houck and Hoffman (1986) found that the feature integration of colour and orientation can sometimes be accomplished without attention (James et al.,

This is only the illusion of attention which makes us believe that we are getting everything around us. The authors, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons explained this illusion with their studies and real-life stories of people to explain this illusion more clearly. The illusion of attention is the link to all the illusions. The authors have provided multiple examples to

The article by Avital-Cohen and Tsal (2016) discussed the flanker task experiment, which asserted that distractor interference happens unconsciously as a result of focused attention toward the target. The results from the original flanker task indicated that participants had slower responses for incongruent trials, since the distractors are inconsistent with the target and would require a different response (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). However, Avital-Cohen and Tsal (2016) questioned the findings from the flanker task experiment. They decided to challenge the idea that only the target stimuli receives top-down processing, and not the distractors (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). The first experiment aimed to test whether the distractor interference is purely bottom-up processing as claimed in the flanker task. The experiment manipulated participants’ expectations of the target using the context effect - a type of top-down processing - by changing the distractors to be either letters or digits (Psych 240 lecture, 9/21/16). Then, the researchers conducted a second experiment and eliminated the ambiguity of distractors. They wanted to test whether the result from experiment 1 was caused by an overall bias or the ambiguous distractors. In experiment 2, the researchers predicted that they would obtain similar results to the first experiment only if the results were due to an overall bias effect (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). This study allows us to deepen our understanding of available

Moreover, Graham and McLaren (1998) claimed that there is no latent inhibition in humans at all, and all examples of it are in fact examples of negative priming. Indeed, because humans are very well at paying attention to something, it is hard to completely ignore the stimulus in the background. A person would still hear white noise or see the red font but will try to suppress it as irrelevant information. Therefore, those might be in fact examples of negative priming.

Late selection models provide a possible explanation for results obtained in some dichotic listening experiments where processing of unattended stimuli did seem to take place. For example, Corteen and Wood (1972, as cited in Naish, 2010), paired electric shocks with certain words, so that a conditioned galvanic skin response (GSR) took place. Later, when these words were again presented to the unattended ear , (without electric shocks), the GSR still occurred for these words as well as other words from the same category, indicating that processing for meaning had indeed taken place. Late section theories could also be used to explain the cocktail party effect (Naish , 2010) i.e. if someone is attending to one conversation at a party and their name is mentioned in another conversation in the room, they are able to hear their name and switch their

This buffer was a temporary memory store in which the unselected information could be held in parallel for short periods of time (Styles, 2006). Information can remain in the buffer for processing at a later stage, if this is not the case, it corrodes and is then lost (Martindale, 1991). It is only when the “information passes through the filter into the limited capacity channel, which is a serial processor, that it is identified” (Styles, 2006, p19). The indication is that therefore, selection from the parallel input is made at early levels of processing, and is consequently an “early selection model” (Styles, 2006). A number of theorist’s have, however, introduced models that completely reject Broadbent’s Filter model. An example is that of Deutsch and Deutsch’s attention model (Martindale, 1991).

Psychology is a broad subject filled with many different theories, several theories of which that were particularly interesting fall under the topic “The Learning Perspective”. In fact, Learning is described as the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught. This paper takes a leap further into the psychology and true meaning behind the Learning Perspective, as well as its Biological Importance in our everyday lives. The ideology behind his perspective basically revolves around the idea that behavior is trained, conditioned, reinforced and essentially reflexive. Two of the main theories are listed as follows; The Behaviorism theory and The Cognitive theory. Each theory draws a clear distinction about its differences and similarities with its connection to stimuli. For example, in both sub theories, such as Classical Conditioning and Operant Conditioning, an action is done and a specific response is given. What sets both theories apart are the positivity or negativity of the reward for the action. From this paper, the importance of Learning is discussed as well as the effectiveness of the different theories and its principles that define and set each other apart.