Research on the Logistics and Mechanisms of Attention

The human brain is capable of perceiving and interpreting information or stimuli received through the sense organs (i.e., eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin) (Weiten, 1998). This ability to perceive and interpret stimulus allows the human being to make meaningful sense of the world and environment around them. However, even as the human being is able to perceive and interpret stimuli information through all sense organs, stimuli is most often or primarily interpreted using the visual (eyes) and auditory (ears) sense organs (Anderson, 2009). However, for the purpose of this paper, the visual information process will be examined.

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.

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.

Evidence for space-based attention comes primarily from a variety of cuing tasks, which assume that reaction time for detecting a target indicates processing efficiency. Since attention enhances processing efficiency, one would expect that reaction times are faster for attended features, and slower for unattended ones. For example, Posner (1980) showed that target letters were identified more quickly when they had been pre-cued by a dot in the same location. This suggests that attention was directed at the cued region of space. Egly and Homa (1984) used a task in which a general circular area was pre-cued. They found that stimulus detection was

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

Also, the findings were consistent with the suggestion that ‘the equal salience of the local and global targets increase sensitivity of stimuli to the effects of how we perceive’ Yovel (2001) cited in Ness et al. (2014).

In his article, “The ages of distraction”, author Frank Furedi asserts that humans have been distracted for many ages, rather than that we are living in a modern age of distraction. He describes this inattentiveness as part of human nature. In this situation, the role of “nature” is genetics, and other biological forces which may cause humans to instinctively redirect attention.

Sitting in a stadium watching a football game requires being able to focus attention on the game while distractions interfere with your focus. “Our visual surroundings typically include a multitude of objects that differ in their location, shapes and constituent features. Specific objects may be selected for detailed examination and perceptual enhancement by directing attention to their locations or their identifying features” (Schoenfield, Hopf, Merkel, Heinze, & Hillyard, 2014). At a football game there is a lot going on that requires “divided attention – which is the distribution of attention among two or more tasks” (Goldstein, 2015, p. 100). During the game, some of my attention will be object- based focused like keeping track of

Behavioral Inattention Test is intended to display for UVN and afford information related to its treatment. (RMD, n.d.). It consists of a combination of pen and paper tests with observation of behavioral and activity. BIT requires sixty minutes to be completed. The total score of BIT is 227 that means the higher degree the person gets, the greater neglect he/she

The cognitive-motor task paradigm is based on theories related to attentional resources. Attentional resources are defined as information processing resources that are required to complete a task 19. The limited capacity theory states that one central attentional resource exists 43. When two tasks are performed simultaneously, the central system must divide the total capacity between the tasks at hand. The performance of the secondary task can provide an indication of the total processing capacity and the attentional demands for the primary task. If the primary task does not require a large portion of the total processing capacity, performance of the secondary task will not be altered. If however, the primary task is more demanding for processing capacity, the performance of the secondary task will decrease as the total capacity is reached 43. In this theory, the two tasks compete for the same pool of limited resources. However, multiple resources theory states that there are several attentional resources, each with limited capacity, and the amount of specific resources required for performing certain tasks depends on the tasks characteristics. Under the assumption of multiple resource pools, the execution of two concurrent tasks only suffers if some of the resources required to perform one of the tasks are also necessary to perform the other task. Thus, when two tasks are performed simultaneously, the competition for available

Vision is the most important sensory compared to other sensory modality therefore there is a wide range of research carried out on vision. Visual attention is defined as a term that portrays how individuals are able to change their view while attending to an image that is of a normal perspective due to the neurones in the cortex (Carasco, 2011). It is often described as a focal point which is situated with different locations in the region of space (Wright, 1998). Visual search requires detecting a specific target as quickly as possible. For example, trying to find your car in a large car park. By focusing our attention to the specific environment it improves our visual search of the target (Keane et al., 2015). The speed of a visual search

I had been driving an 18-wheeler for many years and attention is a big deal after putting in a few hours behind the wheel. The early selection models of attention speak of having an idea of the information before deciding on what to filter and the late selection models say that the person has selections in mind before filtering (Goldstein, 2015). What I am getting from this that applies to my incidents in driving is that I knew a car was there before making a selection to avoid it, or I did not know the car was there until I made a selection to avoid it.

By contrast, late selection models, e.g. Deutsch and Deutsch (1963) place the bottleneck much nearer to the response end of processing. Their model assumes that all incoming stimuli are automatically processed and analysed for meaning, regardless of whether they are consciously attended to or not, with selective filtering occurring only after meaning has been extracted.

Deutsch and Deutsch (1963) offer a model in which all stimuli are fully analysed, with the most significant message determining the response (Eyesnck, 2010). This theory proposes a bottleneck, as the filter is placed closer to the response end of the processing system. This model is recognized as a late-selection model (Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963). The Deutsch and Deutsch model was later modified by Norman (1968) who alleges that sensory inputs are processed routinely and instinctively before we consciously know about them. Norman suggests that no signal is filtered out but all are processed to the point of activating the stored