The idea of attention as a resource is that the cognitive system has a limited resource that can be used for carrying out so-called attention-demanding processes. The resource is assumed to be a continuous quantity that can be split arbitrarily and allotted to different processes, depending on task demands.
What is attentional resource?
What is the capture of attention?
How is working memory related to attention?
How does attention affect memory maintenance?
What is the relationship between working memory and attention?
Is attention control a dual task?
Is attention a limited resource?
See 4 more
About this website
What does attentional resources mean?
Attentional resources are the amount of attention available to perform cognitive tasks that require effort [2] . Mental workload is widely recognized as one of the most important human factors constructs; it is predictive of driving performance and safety [3]. ...
What are attentional resources in psychology?
Malleable attentional resources theory posits that attentional capacity can change size in response to changes in task demands. As such, the performance decrements associated with mental underload can be explained by a lack of appropriate attentional resources.
Are attentional resources limited?
Human information processing is limited by attentional resources. That is, via attentional mechanisms, humans select a limited amount of sensory input to process while other sensory input is neglected.
What are attentional processes in psychology?
Broadly, the attention process can be described as selective concentration on salient environmental features while ignoring other aspects. From: Psychology and Geriatrics, 2015.
What are the 4 types of attention?
There are four main types of attention that we use in our daily lives: selective attention, divided attention, sustained attention, and executive attention.
What are the factors affecting attention in psychology?
What are the determining factors of attention?Intensity: the more intense a stimulus is (strength of stimulus) the more likely you are to give attention resources to it.Size: the bigger a stimulus is the more attention resources it captures.Movement: moving stimuli capture more attention that ones that remain static.More items...
Why is attention a limited resource?
The idea of attention as a resource is that the cognitive system has a limited resource that can be used for carrying out so-called attention-demanding processes. The resource is assumed to be a continuous quantity that can be split arbitrarily and allotted to different processes, depending on task demands.
How do we allocate attentional resources for multi tasking?
Since information processing is resource limited, the human can allocate conscious mental effort to only one task while queuing others. This is the motivation for task prioritization. There is a tendency to process only that incoming information which is relevant to the task currently being attended to.
What is the difference between memory and attention?
Attention and working memory are both key to learning new information. Attention allows information to be taken in. Working memory helps the brain make sense of it. Many kids who struggle to learn have attention issues, working memory issues, or both.
What are the 3 types of attention?
Types of AttentionArousal: Refers to our activation level and level of alertness, whether we are tired or energized.Focused Attention: Refers to our ability to focus attention on a stimulus.Sustained Attention: The ability to attend to a stimulus or activity over a long period of time.More items...
What is the example of attention process?
Selective attention involves being able to choose and selectively attend to certain stimuli in the environment while at the same time tuning other things out. 4 For example, you might selectively attend to a book you are reading while tuning out the sound of your next-door neighbor's car alarm going off.
What is attention example?
Attention is the behavior a person uses to focus the senses, from sight to hearing and even smell. It may focus on information that matters outside of the cab (e.g., signals, traffic), inside the cab (e.g., displays, controls), or on the radio network. Attention to information that is not important is distraction.
What are the three characteristics of attention?
The following are some of the characteristics of attention: (i) Attention is always changing. (ii) Attention is always an active center of our experience. (iii) It is selective. (iv) Attention is continuous.
How is attention measured in psychology?
The use of an eye-tracker is probably the most widely used tool for attention measurement. The idea is to use a device which is able to precisely measure the eyes gaze which obviously only provide information concerning covert attention.
What is attention in cognitive psychology?
What is Attention? Attention is the ability to choose and concentrate on relevant stimuli. Attention is the cognitive process that makes it possible to position ourselves towards relevant stimuli and consequently respond to it. This cognitive ability is very important and is an essential function in our daily lives.
What is the difference between attention and concentration?
In this context the definition of attention is to be able to pick out the relevant stimuli whilst ignoring distractions. Concentration can be defined as 'attentional focus' and refers to when the mind is focussed on a particular stimulus.
Working Memory and Attention – A Conceptual Analysis and Review
the entire attentional resource, there is no way of stopping it. A meta-control process is necessary to ensure that there is always enough resource left for control processes.
Attention and Working Memory: Two Sides of the Same Neural Coin?
New research by Princeton neuroscientists suggests that James was on to something, finding that attention to the outside world and attention to our own thoughts are actually two sides of the same neural coin. What’s more, they have observed the coin as it flips inside the brain. A paper published in Nature by Matthew Panichello, a postdoctoral research associate at the Princeton Neuroscience ...
Working Memory and Attention - A Conceptual Analysis and Review
The first pertains to attentional selection of the contents of working memory, controlled by mechanisms of filtering out irrelevant stimuli, and removing no-longer relevant representations from working memory. Within working memory contents, a single item is often selected into the focus of attention for processing.
What is attentional resource?
The idea of attention as a resource is that the cognitive system has a limited resource that can be used for carrying out so-called attention-demanding processes. The resource is assumed to be a continuous quantity that can be split arbitrarily and allotted to different processes, depending on task demands. Processing efficiency (i.e., speed, accuracy) is a positive monotonic function of the amount of resource assigned to a process (Navon & Gopher, 1979). The assumption that WM capacity reflects a limited resource has a long tradition (Anderson, Reder, & Lebiere, 1996; Case, 1972; Just & Carpenter, 1980; Ma, Husain, & Bays, 2014). Authors linking WM to an attentional resource are endorsing the view that the limited capacity of WM reflects a limited resource, and that this resource also serves some (or all) functions commonly ascribed to attention. Three versions of this idea can be distinguished by which functions the attentional resource is assumed to be needed for: (1) storage and processing of information (e.g., Just & Carpenter, 1992), (2) perceptual attention and memory maintenance (e.g., Ester, Fukuda, May, Vogel, & Awh, 2014; Kiyonaga & Egner, 2014), or (3) the control of attention (e.g., Allen, Baddeley, & Hitch, 2006; Baddeley, 1993, 1996; Lavie, 2005).
What is the capture of attention?
Capture of attention by salient stimuli, to stimuli learned to be relevant, or to stimuli in the focus of attention of WM
How is working memory related to attention?
There is broad agreement that working memory is closely related to attention. This article delineates several theoretical options for conceptualizing this link, and evaluates their viability in light of their theoretical implications and the empirical support they received. A first divide exists between the concept of attention as a limited resource, and the concept of attention as selective information processing. Theories conceptualizing attention as a resource assume that this resource is responsible for the limited capacity of working memory. Three versions of this idea have been proposed: Attention as a resource for storage and processing, a shared resource for perceptual attention and memory maintenance, and a resource for the control of attention. The first of these three is empirically well supported, but the other two are not. By contrast, when attention is understood as a selection mechanism, it is usually not invoked to explain the capacity limit of working memory – rather, researchers ask how different forms of attention interact with working memory, in two areas. The first pertains to attentional selection of the contents of working memory, controlled by mechanisms of filtering out irrelevant stimuli, and removing no-longer relevant representations from working memory. Within working memory contents, a single item is often selected into the focus of attention for processing. The second area pertains to the role of working memory in cognitive control. Working memory contributes to controlling perceptual attention – by holding templates for targets of perceptual selection – and controlling action – by holding task sets to implement our current goals.
How does attention affect memory maintenance?
The other is that attention is required directly only for processing, not storage. In this view attention indirectly contributes to memory maintenance because it is needed for refreshing WM representations, which would otherwise decay (Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004). Barrouillet and colleagues further specify the resource required for refreshing as the limited resource for so-called central processes, such as response selection (Barrouillet, Bernardin, Portrat, Vergauwe, & Camos, 2007). Dual-task studies with variants of the PRP (psychological refractory period) paradigm have established a strong capacity limit on central processes (Pashler, 1994), which has been explained by a limited central-attentional resource (Navon & Miller, 2002; Tombu & Jolicoeur, 2003).
What is the relationship between working memory and attention?
Many theorists discussing the relation between working memory and attention characterize attention as a limited resource for maintaining representations in an “active”, available state (Cowan, 2005). Often this resource is assumed to be shared between “storage” and “processing” (Case, Kurland, & Goldberg, 1982; Cowan et al., 2005; Just & Carpenter, 1992). According to this view, the same attentional resource is required for keeping representations available and for carrying out certain basic cognitive processes such as selecting a response to a stimulus. A prediction from this theory is that attention-demanding cognitive processes compete with concurrent storage (Z. Chen & Cowan, 2009).
Is attention control a dual task?
If WM and the control of attention share a limited resource, we should expect substantial dual-task costs when an attention-control demand is combined with WM maintenance. Evidence for such a dual-task cost comes from studies demonstrating that a load on WM increases people’s susceptibility to distraction, for instance by the irrelevant stimuli in a flanker task (Kelley & Lavie, 2011; Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004). Interpretation of this result is complicated by the observation that only a verbal WM load increases the flanker effect – a visual WM load has the opposite effect (Konstantinou, Beal, King, & Lavie, 2014; Konstantinou & Lavie, 2013). Konstantinou et al. (2014) explain this dissociation by assuming that visual WM contents place a load on a visual perceptual resource, and increasing the load on perceptual resources has been shown to reduce flanker interference (Lavie, 2005). In contrast, verbal WM relies on rehearsal for maintenance, and rehearsal competes for a shared attentional-control resource with the control of visual attention. The latter assumption is at odds with the position of most other resource theorists, who assume that rehearsal requires little, if any such resource (Baddeley, 1986; Camos, Lagner, & Barrouillet, 2009; Cowan, 2001). Other studies provide further evidence that a load on WM can both increase and decrease people’s distractability by a flanker stimulus during a perceptual comparison task: When the category of stimuli held in WM matched that of the targets of the comparison task (but not that of the flankers), the flanker compatibility effect increased, but when the WM contents matched the category of the flankers, and not the targets, then the flanker compatibility effect decreased under load compared to no load (Kim, Kim, & Chun, 2005; Park, Kim, & Chun, 2007). Taken together, there is no convincing evidence that loading WM depletes a resource needed for the control of attention.
Is attention a limited resource?
The concept of attention as a limited resource is often linked specifically to controlled attention, whereas automatic attention is thought not to be resource demanding (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). There are two ways in which this link can be spelled out: (a) Attention that is allocated in a controlled manner – according to “top down” influences from our current goals – underlies a resource limit but attention that is automatically attracted to some information independent of its relevance for our current goal does not underlie that resource limit. Stated in this way we face the awkward conclusion that allocating attention to the same object (e.g., a red traffic light in a street scene, or a word we hold in WM) does or does not rely on a limited resource depending on what forces led attention to that object. The same cognitive function – prioritizing processing of the attended information – would be resource consuming or not depending on how it was invoked.
What is time based resource sharing theory?
According to the time-based resource-sharing theory (TBRS; Barrouillet and Camos, 2015 ), both processing and storage share a general purpose, limited capacity attentional resource. If attention is engaged in processing, it cannot be available for maintaining information in working memory; therefore, memory traces decay and are susceptible to interference. The decayed memory traces can be reinstated through refreshing when attention becomes available during short pauses in processing and attention can be shifted to memory items to reactivate them. The TBRS model supposes that information is sustained by rapidly switching from processing to storage so that memory traces can be attentionally refreshed. Thus, it is the amount of time for maintaining the traces between processing items that is important and not the overall duration of the processing component. The TBRS model predicts dual-task costs between processing and storage, with any increase in storage demands having a detrimental effect on processing and any increase on processing having a detrimental effect on maintenance ( Barrouillet et al., 2004; Chen and Cowan, 2009; Vergauwe et al., 2014 ).
How does amodal information affect infants?
For example, if infants focus on the redundancy between faces and voices during speech (e.g. , synchrony or common rhythm) this ensures that infants attend to stimulation from unified events (a person speaking) and not to concurrent sounds or the movements of an unrelated person or object nearby. A large body of infant research (reviewed briefly in the sections ahead) has revealed that sensitivity to redundancy across the senses promotes attention to unified events in the presence of competing sounds and motions. Once unitary events are differentiated from the flux of multimodal stimulation, the process of perception and learning can proceed in a meaningful way.
Why is sensitivity to redundancy important?
A large body of infant research (reviewed briefly in the sections ahead) has revealed that sensitivity to redundancy across the senses promotes attention to unified events in the presence of competing sounds and motions.
Does spatial neglect affect attentional capacity?
This model suggests that patients suffering from persistent spatial neglect have significantly reduced attentional capacity ( Driver and Vuilleumier, 2001) (i.e., limited resources to perform attention-demanding tasks), which may underlie many of their nonspatial deficits such as a protracted attentional blink ( Battelli et al., 2001; Husain et al., 1997; Robertson et al., 1998 ). This limited attentional capacity may affect goal-directed spatial attention mechanisms in an analogous manner as diminished alertness, however, with important differences. In particular, evidence suggests that attentional resources may be lateralized to right ventral frontoparietal regions that, as Corbetta and Shulman (2011) have recently demonstrated, interact with dorsal frontoparietal regions involved in spatial attention. Reduction in available attentional resources, as required in dual-task paradigms, may decrease right ventral frontoparietal (network subserving attentional resources) and dorsal frontoparietal (spatial attention) network interactions, producing increased rightward spatial bias. A key difference is that the attentional capacity model better accounts for the exacerbation of lateralized attention biases in patients during dual-task performance. In contrast, the alertness model would suggest that dual-task performance, which is significantly more stressful/arousing than single-task performance, would be associated with lesser rather than greater rightward spatial bias ( George et al., 2008 ).
How to make the most of limited attentional research?
Trying to juggle multiple tasks hurts productivity, so you can make the most of your limited attentional research by only working on one thing at a time. Getting enough sleep: Research has shown that sufficient sleep is essential for maintaining optimal levels of attention.
What is attention in science?
Attention is the ability to actively process specific information in the environment while tuning out other details. Attention is limited in terms of both capacity and duration, so it is important to have ways to effectively manage the attentional resources we have available in order to make sense of the world.
How to improve attention?
But even people without attention problems can benefit from using strategies designed to improve attention and focus. Some things you can try include: 1 Avoiding multitasking: If you want to improve your focus, try to avoid multitasking. Trying to juggle multiple tasks hurts productivity, so you can make the most of your limited attentional research by only working on one thing at a time. 2 Getting enough sleep: Research has shown that sufficient sleep is essential for maintaining optimal levels of attention. Not only that, the two appear to have a bidirectional relationship; sleep helps regulate attention, but attentional demands can also play a role in sleep. 6 3 Practicing mindfulness: Mindfulness, which involves paying attention to the present moment, is sometimes conceived of as a form of attention. Research has shown that mindfulness training may be helpful for improving attention. 7
How does sleep help with attention?
Not only that, the two appear to have a bidirectional relationship; sleep helps regulate attention , but attentional demands can also play a role in sleep. 6. Practicing mindfulness: Mindfulness, which involves paying attention to the present moment, is sometimes conceived of as a form of attention.
What is the term for the ability to focus on one thing for a continuous period of time?
Sustained Attention. This form of attention, also known as concentration , is the ability to focus on one thing for a continuous period. During this time, people keep their focus on the task at hand and continue to engage in a behavior until the task is complete or a certain period of time has elapsed.
Why is attention important in biology?
Attention is a basic component of our biology, present even at birth. Our orienting reflexes help us determine which events in our environment need to be attended to, a process that aids in our ability to survive.
When does attention peak?
Research suggests that sustained attention peaks during the early 40s and then gradually declines as people age. 2
What is attention like?
Attention acts somewhat like a spotlight, highlighting the details that we need to focus on and casting irrelevant information to the sidelines of our perception.
Who is the author of The Psychology of Attention?
Pashler HE . The Psychology of Attention. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1998.
How Does Selective Attention Work?
At any given moment, we are subjected to a constant barrage of sensory information. The blare of a car horn from the street outside, the chatter of your friends, the click of the keys as you type a paper for school, the hum of the heater as it keeps your room warm on a brisk autumn day.
What does Harold Pashler say about the psychology of attention?
In his text, "The Psychology of Attention," psychology professor Harold Pashler notes that simply presenting messages to different ears will not lead to the selection of one message over the other. The two messages must have some sort of non-overlap in time in order for one to be selectively attended to over the other.
Which philosopher suggested that attention works by utilizing an attenuator that identifies a stimulus based on?
Treisman suggested that while Broadbent's basic approach was correct, it failed to account for the fact that people can still process the meaning of attended messages. Treisman proposed that instead of a filter, attention works by utilizing an attenuator that identifies a stimulus based on physical properties or by meaning. 6
How many models of visual attention are there?
There are two major models describing how visual attention works.
When does selective attention focus on stimulus information?
Theories of selective attention tend to focus on when stimulus information is attended to, either early in the process or late.
What is attentional resource?
The idea of attention as a resource is that the cognitive system has a limited resource that can be used for carrying out so-called attention-demanding processes. The resource is assumed to be a continuous quantity that can be split arbitrarily and allotted to different processes, depending on task demands. Processing efficiency (i.e., speed, accuracy) is a positive monotonic function of the amount of resource assigned to a process (Navon & Gopher, 1979). The assumption that WM capacity reflects a limited resource has a long tradition (Anderson, Reder, & Lebiere, 1996; Case, 1972; Just & Carpenter, 1980; Ma, Husain, & Bays, 2014). Authors linking WM to an attentional resource are endorsing the view that the limited capacity of WM reflects a limited resource, and that this resource also serves some (or all) functions commonly ascribed to attention. Three versions of this idea can be distinguished by which functions the attentional resource is assumed to be needed for: (1) storage and processing of information (e.g., Just & Carpenter, 1992), (2) perceptual attention and memory maintenance (e.g., Ester, Fukuda, May, Vogel, & Awh, 2014; Kiyonaga & Egner, 2014), or (3) the control of attention (e.g., Allen, Baddeley, & Hitch, 2006; Baddeley, 1993, 1996; Lavie, 2005).
What is the capture of attention?
Capture of attention by salient stimuli, to stimuli learned to be relevant, or to stimuli in the focus of attention of WM
How is working memory related to attention?
There is broad agreement that working memory is closely related to attention. This article delineates several theoretical options for conceptualizing this link, and evaluates their viability in light of their theoretical implications and the empirical support they received. A first divide exists between the concept of attention as a limited resource, and the concept of attention as selective information processing. Theories conceptualizing attention as a resource assume that this resource is responsible for the limited capacity of working memory. Three versions of this idea have been proposed: Attention as a resource for storage and processing, a shared resource for perceptual attention and memory maintenance, and a resource for the control of attention. The first of these three is empirically well supported, but the other two are not. By contrast, when attention is understood as a selection mechanism, it is usually not invoked to explain the capacity limit of working memory – rather, researchers ask how different forms of attention interact with working memory, in two areas. The first pertains to attentional selection of the contents of working memory, controlled by mechanisms of filtering out irrelevant stimuli, and removing no-longer relevant representations from working memory. Within working memory contents, a single item is often selected into the focus of attention for processing. The second area pertains to the role of working memory in cognitive control. Working memory contributes to controlling perceptual attention – by holding templates for targets of perceptual selection – and controlling action – by holding task sets to implement our current goals.
How does attention affect memory maintenance?
The other is that attention is required directly only for processing, not storage. In this view attention indirectly contributes to memory maintenance because it is needed for refreshing WM representations, which would otherwise decay (Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004). Barrouillet and colleagues further specify the resource required for refreshing as the limited resource for so-called central processes, such as response selection (Barrouillet, Bernardin, Portrat, Vergauwe, & Camos, 2007). Dual-task studies with variants of the PRP (psychological refractory period) paradigm have established a strong capacity limit on central processes (Pashler, 1994), which has been explained by a limited central-attentional resource (Navon & Miller, 2002; Tombu & Jolicoeur, 2003).
What is the relationship between working memory and attention?
Many theorists discussing the relation between working memory and attention characterize attention as a limited resource for maintaining representations in an “active”, available state (Cowan, 2005). Often this resource is assumed to be shared between “storage” and “processing” (Case, Kurland, & Goldberg, 1982; Cowan et al., 2005; Just & Carpenter, 1992). According to this view, the same attentional resource is required for keeping representations available and for carrying out certain basic cognitive processes such as selecting a response to a stimulus. A prediction from this theory is that attention-demanding cognitive processes compete with concurrent storage (Z. Chen & Cowan, 2009).
Is attention control a dual task?
If WM and the control of attention share a limited resource, we should expect substantial dual-task costs when an attention-control demand is combined with WM maintenance. Evidence for such a dual-task cost comes from studies demonstrating that a load on WM increases people’s susceptibility to distraction, for instance by the irrelevant stimuli in a flanker task (Kelley & Lavie, 2011; Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004). Interpretation of this result is complicated by the observation that only a verbal WM load increases the flanker effect – a visual WM load has the opposite effect (Konstantinou, Beal, King, & Lavie, 2014; Konstantinou & Lavie, 2013). Konstantinou et al. (2014) explain this dissociation by assuming that visual WM contents place a load on a visual perceptual resource, and increasing the load on perceptual resources has been shown to reduce flanker interference (Lavie, 2005). In contrast, verbal WM relies on rehearsal for maintenance, and rehearsal competes for a shared attentional-control resource with the control of visual attention. The latter assumption is at odds with the position of most other resource theorists, who assume that rehearsal requires little, if any such resource (Baddeley, 1986; Camos, Lagner, & Barrouillet, 2009; Cowan, 2001). Other studies provide further evidence that a load on WM can both increase and decrease people’s distractability by a flanker stimulus during a perceptual comparison task: When the category of stimuli held in WM matched that of the targets of the comparison task (but not that of the flankers), the flanker compatibility effect increased, but when the WM contents matched the category of the flankers, and not the targets, then the flanker compatibility effect decreased under load compared to no load (Kim, Kim, & Chun, 2005; Park, Kim, & Chun, 2007). Taken together, there is no convincing evidence that loading WM depletes a resource needed for the control of attention.
Is attention a limited resource?
The concept of attention as a limited resource is often linked specifically to controlled attention, whereas automatic attention is thought not to be resource demanding (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). There are two ways in which this link can be spelled out: (a) Attention that is allocated in a controlled manner – according to “top down” influences from our current goals – underlies a resource limit but attention that is automatically attracted to some information independent of its relevance for our current goal does not underlie that resource limit. Stated in this way we face the awkward conclusion that allocating attention to the same object (e.g., a red traffic light in a street scene, or a word we hold in WM) does or does not rely on a limited resource depending on what forces led attention to that object. The same cognitive function – prioritizing processing of the attended information – would be resource consuming or not depending on how it was invoked.
