Late Selection Models Of Attention

“The reaction time of a distracted cell phone driver is more than 40% than those of an undistracted driver” (Hague).

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.

Matt Richtel’s non-fiction novel, A Deadly Wandering is an insightful story about a young man named Reggie Shaw who lost got distracted behind the wheel for a little too long and took the lives of two well-known rocket scientists. The story highlights key aspects of everyone who was brought into the accident including friends, families, lawyers, even the people who were just driving behind Reggie that despairing day. Not only does Ritchel write about the accident but he also writes about the research showing how our attention works. Little does our population know on how in depth our attention works and how valuable or maybe even overpowering it can be. With today’s technology we are vastly discovering more on how the brain truly works and how it can affect us in a day-to-day lifestyle.

1. Being able to know the difference between two things and tear them apart from each other is?(Pg 156)

These tasks require mind-off-the-road. Researcher Green found out that the tasks which are not visually demanding like day dreaming or listening to a long speech in phone could increase the probability of crashes. Two different conditions and a control condition were compared with 24 participants actively participating in it [5].

Cognitive (mental) distractions, these happen when the drivers' mind becomes focused on voices and actions around them, apart from

Abrupt appearance of an object within peripheral visual fields are sudden onset distractors (SOD) and they can have effects on attention and reaction times. Attentional capture occurs when a distractor stimulus appears in a field of vision and pulls focus away from the task at hand. This has the effect of increasing reaction times as it diverts a subject’s attention while the brain registers and processes the new information. When the brain is focussed upon a specific task the distractor captures attention and thus can increase reaction time through this visual processing mechanism. This demonstrates automaticity, a reflex which is both not inhibited by increasing cognitive load (load-insensitivity criterion) and not voluntarily controlled (intentionality criterion). The attentional

With that said, the majority of drivers are not well-educated on the intricacies of human attention. As a result, drivers act on the innate need to respond in what seems like an appropriate fashion to the object that gained their bottom-up attention. A 1999 research study on human decision-making (dubbed the “chocolate cake” experiment for one of the food choices presented to subjects) found that people are more likely to make poor decisions when their brains are overwhelmed (Richter, 219). Drivers suffer sensory overload from having to focus on the road in front of them and by the sounds of their mobile phones, as well as hearing any passengers also in

either instructed to follow a vehicle ahead through a simulated version of London, or were given

Yet, contrary results have been found; high levels of latent inhibition have been reported for chronically medicated patients with high levels of negative symptoms (Rascle et al., 2001), particularly when combined with low levels of positive symptoms (Cohen et al., 2004) Recently, contrasting evidence was found in a study investigating schizotypy. Granger at al., (2016) had participants pre-exposed to stimuli, which were letters, they were told to count how many times the letter M appeared. Participants also had to guess when X would be presented as early as possible; X was predicted by both H (novel) and S (pre-exposed). A clear effect of enhanced latent inhibition was discovered. A significant predictor was unusual experienced on the O-Life scale therefore enhanced latent inhibition was found to be associated with positive symptoms in schizotypy. Opposing results were reported by Kraus at al., (2016) and Gray (1992) who reported low levels of latent

The distractions of driving are a popular area of research. Recent studies have looked at what distracts drivers and what other failures of awareness may contribute to traffic accidents. The goal of this paper is to look at research and explain how change blindness can possibly effect driving.

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.,

Attention grabber: You’re on the highway, cruising around at normal speed, singing along with your favorite song, nothing out of the ordinary. Suddenly, the car in front of you breaks hard and you realize it’s too late to brake without getting in an accident. You look at your left side mirror and realize there’s a car next to you. You have two options, break hard and prepare yourself to crash or have let your car do the work for you and let it brake for you before you even realize that the car in front of you braked

Compare and contrast early vs late selection models of attention. How well do they explain how we selectively attend to information?

Research carried out on attention has mainly been associated with the selective processing of incoming sensory information. It proposes, to some degree, our awareness of the world depends on what we choose to focus on and not simply the stimulation received by our senses. Attention is often linked to a filter that screens out most potential stimuli whilst allowing a select few to pass through into our conscious awareness, however, a great deal of debate has been devoted to where the filter is situated in the information processing chain (Martindale, 1991). Psychologists have made extensive contributions to this subject matter in the past century. Notable examples include Donald Broadbent's filter theory of attention (1958), which set the