Processing capacity is a very broad and flexible category according to many researchers. In fact, the quote above mentioned suggests that we often fail to notice things that happen just in front of us (unexpected events that are often salient) either because we were completely absorbed by something else or because we had so many things to do at the same time that we couldn’t pay attention to it. We have all at least once failed to see a friend who was waving at us while eating in the cafeteria or walking in a crowded street. The primary question that we should ask ourselves is: how many things can we attend at the same time? The truth is that we didn’t perceive this friend because of a phenomenon called “inattentional blindness”. The problem is that the richness of our visual experience leads us to believe that our visual representation will include and preserve the same amount of detail (Levin et al 2000). In this paper we’ll see the different theories of inattentional blindness, and the classical theories demonstrating this paradigm. Classical theories demonstrating the inattentional blindness paradigm are (1) the perceptual load, (2) inattentional amnesia and (3) expectation. (1) The effects of perceptual load on the occurrence of inattentional blindness were demonstrated clearly by experiment. In an experiment conducted by Finch and Lavie in 2007, participants were given identical series of central cross-targets with two arms of clearly different color (blue and green) and slightly different length. Participants were split in two groups, one performing an easy task (low load condition) and the other a harder task (high load condition). The group performing the easiest task only had to make color discrimination between the tw... ... middle of paper ... ...We also saw that memory can play an important role too, but this is not yet clearly demonstrated. Moreover some studies reveal that the congruency (vs. incongruence) of the critical stimulus can also play an important role in awareness, a phenomenon called cocktail party effect. Such phenomenon makes clear that the relevance of the stimuli plays a key role in awareness and perception. The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much the same way that one can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room and yet be able to hear if someone calls out his name or other relevant stimuli (danger words for example). Still, sometimes we fail to perceive something that is happening right in front of us. It is easy to miss something you’re not looking for.
A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
William James, an American psychologist, proposed the first theory of what we now call “selective attention”. Selective attention is the assumption that in order to focus on one activity going on in your environment, you must hinder all other tasks occurring in the background. A good illustration of this would be to block out the music playing for the sake of progress on school work. This is referred to as the spotlight theory. In premise, your visual attention works like a spotlight. There is a focal point, or place or concentration. Beyond the focal point is considered to be fringe; seen by the viewer, but not observed clearly. Outside of the focal point and fringe is surplus and not viewed at all (Cherry, 2014).
Though the term “inattentional blindness” would not be conceived until 1998, the concept itself is not new. As cited by Simons and Chabris, Hungarian neurologist and psychiatrist Rezso Balint wrote in 1907 “It is a well-known phenomenon that we do not notice anything happening in our surroundings while being absorbed in the inspection of something…” (1999). Using the term “selective looking,” Ulric Neisser, an American psychologist, demonstrated this idea in 1979. In his study, he instructed subjects to count the number of times a group of participants threw a basketball to each other. While the subjects were focused on this attention demanding task, a woman with an umbrella walked in the middle of the participants. At th...
prove to be blind when it comes to the world they are in. By looking
Such recent theories related to vigilance decrement suggest that the reasoning behind the vigilance decrement is related to the decrease of “processing resources”. The participants in this experiment was required continuous monitor of the radar screen for a long period. In this time the continuous groups had to either make “targets or neutral stimuli discrimination” with any form of rest or any form of other activity. Considering these things in mind it is suggested that the resource section probably w...
In this documentary we get to discover the differences between our conscious and unconscious brain. This video provides us with useful information on how and why our brains act in the way they do using multiple tests to prove each point. Our brains are made of parts, like a car, and they all are needed in order to function properly. The video names the parts and the functions of each throughout the video. They use a magician’s tricks throughout the documentary to show how our brains suppress what is not in our “spotlight” attention proving that our brain can only focus on one thing at a time. If we compare this to our textbook, it says that this is called selective attention. The marshmallow test, showed in the video, helps us understand how
It is often thought that humans can receive all the information that invades their senses, however, it is fact they are not able to process all of the received information. Humans must selectively choose what information to perceive and ignore irrelevant information. Two questions are raised, therefore: what allows us to selectively attend information and what happens to unattended information, is it proceeded to any extend or not proceeded at all? Recently, the phenomenon of negative-priming started to be used to study selective attention.
Mitchell, K., & Zaragoza, M. (2001). Contextual overlap and eyewitness suggestibility. Memory and Cognition, 29 (4), 616-626. doi: 10.1002/acp.857
In his 2002 review, Ronald A. Rensink, divides the study of change detection into three phases (Rensink, 2002). The first phase, from mid-1950s to mid-1960s, investigates change detection when change occurs in a saccade. Whilst change detection was considered an easy task at the time, the studies showed poor results proving that detection is not a simple task after all. In the second phase he combines the studies on limits of detection of gap contingent changes with those on visual integration as a basis of limited capacity visual short-term memory. And finally, in the third phase, Rensink emphasizes the idea that change detection involves mechanisms central to the way humans perceive the world.
Though the experiment shows that attention is vital for change detection, we should consider the size/ impact of the change in the environment. If the change to an environment is small, would it result in the change being detected? Do providing little clues draw attention effectively to where the change is being made? In support of this argument, Rensink (1997) showed that even with small clues, if the clue is not directed properly then detecting change will not have an effect. A proposal of Rensink is that the absence of attention will cause visual contents to be missed. On the other hand, Simon and Levin (1998) suggest that a person could miss things happening in their environment if his or her attention is occupied by something
Change blindness is a perceptual phenomenon where people may have trouble noticing small or large differences in a scene right in front of them. Just because someone glances at an image doesn’t mean that they have truly seen what is there. One must always focus to detect certain differences in one’s atmosphere in a quicker manner than the average person. It is more likely to notice a difference in artwork that you are familiar with, rather than a difference on an unknown piece of artwork. Why does this happen? Repetition helps the brain learn quicker, therefor helping one detect differences between things that they have previously seen before. Time and repetition could be very similar. Although, repetition of flickering pictures that you are seeing for the first time may trick the brain into thinking they are the same. How long does it take the brain to learn the difference
Subliminal or unconscious perception refers to the idea that stimuli presented below the threshold for conscious awareness can influence an individual's thoughts, feelings, or actions (2). The possibility that an individual can acquire and act on input without being aware of doing so has implications for the study of consciousness and the larger set of processes which characterize the I-function. It is generally assumed that that conscious perception of a stimulus is necessary in order to act on that stimulus, and this conscious decision to act is one of several processes which characterize the I-function.
Rensink, Ronald A. Change Blindness. Rep. University of British Columbia, n.d. Web. 15 April 2014. < http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/publications/download/RR-MGY.pdf >
Khaneman (1973) devised model of attention as he believed a limited amount of attention is allocated to tasks by a central processor. Many factors determine how much attentional capacity can be allocated and how much is needed to carry out a task, as the central processor has variable but limited capacity which is dependent on motivation and arousal. The central processor engages a variety of tasks such as motor, visual, auditory, memory and so on. The central processor evaluates the amount of concentration necessary to meet task demands, which forms the basis of allocation of capacity.
Sensory memory provides the ability to truly experience photograpical skills, enabling one’s self to focus on the details from the image (Sperling, G., 1960). However, seconds later, short-term memory can only recover few details from the image (Phillips, W. A., 1974). Days later, it may even be difficult to recall the whole image, so the brain may only recall the gist of the image (Brainerd C.J., Reyna V.F., 2005). According to a research from the book “To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in