05 attention and consciousness F25.pdf

Selective Attentions

• capacity is limited so attention is selective

• There is a limit in our brain - we can’t pay attention to more than few thing

• Limits on how many things can be processed at once – attention is therefore selective.

For example, if there is a group of people having tons of conversations and we walk in, we have a hard time focusing on one conversation. But then we might lost attention to other conversations.

It is also called The Cocktail party phoneme

Directions of Attentions (Conscious Strategic)

There is this kind of experiment where both sides input different, and they are asking what the other one is replying.

Shadowing

• Direct attention to one channel while ignoring the other channel.
• Attention might be captured, for example, by meaningful content inan unattended channel

Direct attention

If we direct our attention to a specific region of the image

its more likely to detect the target if it appears there.

• Attention can also be ‘captured’ by stimuli with certain properties… appearances/ disappearances of objects, motion, etc.

Socially Relevant Stimuli

Our attention system might be tuned to us as a social species.