NOTES ON ATTENTION

I have been unable to find an article that covers the items on the study guide, so here is a 
summary of some of the things I would like you to think about.

William James pointed out that our personal world, i.e., what we know and remember, is 
largely self-constructed. We know and remember that to which we pay attention. The 
remainder of the events that may have surrounded us, but to which we did not pay 
attention, have had no role in shaping our individual worlds. Makes the capacity of 
attention fairly important, yes? So, what is it? Let's review some features of our behavior 
that may yield a few clues. 

(1) We can focus on some event to the apparent exclusion of everything else. A 
sudden loud noise, for example, will get us to turn in its ostensible direction and 
look for its source, breaking off whatever else we were doing. That is relatively 
involuntary behavior. However, we can do it voluntarily too. You can choose to 
listen to a piece of music and not attend to conversations around you or to the 
newspaper in front of you.
(2) Even though you seem to focus on one thing, you may be giving covert attention 
to other things. Suppose you are in a conversation with someone at a large party. 
You can hear that person, even though the sounds of many conversations are 
reaching your ears. Your ability to filter out the other voices has led to a theory 
that attention functions as a bottleneck, permitting only a few signals in. 
However, while you are in your conversation, what would happen if your name 
was uttered by someone in another conversation? You would hear it. Therefore, it 
can't be that you simply filter out other voices, for you must be listening to them 
enough to detect those important words.
(3) We can walk and chew gum at the same time. As the example above suggests, we 
must be able to do more than one thing at a time, even though one task seems to 
occupy us. In fact, our lives are full of examples of our ability to do multiple tasks 
simultaneously. Can you drive your car and have a conversation with your 
passenger? Run to a spot on the field to be able to intercept a thrown ball? These 
examples raise the possibility that attention depends on the allocation of 
intellectual resources and that those resources can be doled out as needed.
(4) Some activities seem so automatic that they do not require attention. A well-
practiced activity like walking doesn't need conscious supervision, and therefore 
doesn't need many intellectual resources, so activities that do, like conversations, 
can get enough. If the "walking" is made difficult, as in learning a complicated 
dance step, conversation stops. The walking has changed from being automatic to 
requiring conscious control.
(5) Sometimes it is hard to pay attention, particularly for any length of time. In 
circumstances requiring constant attention of people like radar monitors or 
sentries, it has been demonstrated that accuracy begins to dwindle after 20 
minutes. Breaks, however short, are needed to maintain vigilance. It is even worse 
when you have to track a long message. Suppose you must listen to an important 
lecture and further suppose that the lecture is boring. If you force yourself to 
listen, how long can you maintain your attention? William James estimated 3 
minutes.
(6) Sometimes it is impossible to ignore one source of information that competes with 
another for your attention. A well-known example is the Stroop test. I'll try to 
have this in class. Imagine a list of color names, e.g., red, green, blue, red, yellow, 
etc, printed in different colored inks. For each word, assume that the ink color 
does not correspond to the word. Further imagine that you now try to name each 
ink color as fast as you can, down the list. It's tough. You just can't ignore those 
words.
(7) Like the radar operator, you can deploy your attention to some part of space, e.g., 
watching a door to see who will enter a room next. You needn't actually look at 
the door, however. It is possible to attend to a location other than the one your 
eyes are looking at.
(8) Deploying attention in space may depend on what your brain can and can't do. 
Patients with damage to one hemisphere often seem to neglect some part of space. 
That is, they do not "see" something in one place, even though the visual system 
is intact.