To drive your car, you also must visually select information from the environment so that you can get safely to your destination. This means that a person may have more success in some situations than in others. attentional focus the directing of attention to specific characteristics in a performance environment, or to action-preparation activities. W. S. (2014). A. L., Pesaran, We observe and attend to the environment in which we move to detect features that help us determine what skill to perform and how to perform it. For example, if a physical therapist tells a patient to "pay close attention to where you place your foot on the stair step," the patient has the "momentary intention" to allocate his or her attention according to the therapist's instruction. J. J., & Temprado, Study Chapter 9- Attention as a Limited Capacity Resource flashcards from Kimberly Arbour's class online, or in Brainscape's iPhone or Android app. Although the specific definition of this concept is difficult to identify, there is general agreement that it refers to our limited capability to engage in multiple cognitive and motor activities simultaneously (commonly referred to as "multitasking") and our need to selectively focus on specific environmental context features when we perform motor skills. While concentrating on your professor during a lecture, haven't you been distracted when a classmate has dropped some books on the floor? An interesting note was that the experts also looked at the server's feet and knees during the preparatory phase. Example. The location of the source of these resources is central, which means the CNS; furthermore, there is a limited amount of these resources available for use at any given time. However, an important question arises concerning how well this procedure assesses visual selective attention. As a result, the degree of automaticity for a skill or information-processing activity may be only partially automatic when the attention demand of the activity is assessed. Daniel Kahneman took a different approach to describing attention, by describing its division, rather than selection . The discussion in this chapter will address two of these issues: the simultaneous performance of multiple activities, and the detection of, and attention to, relevant information in the performance environment. Lab 9 in the Online Learning Center Lab Manual provides an opportunity for you to experience the dual-task procedure to assess attention-capacity demands of two tasks performed simultaneously. P. (2004). In America, William James at Harvard University provided one of the earliest definitions of attention in 1890, describing it as the "focalization, concentration, of consciousness.". Kahneman's model of attention. Instruction also plays a part in the way certain features of cues become more meaningful than others. Introduction. Capacity theory is the theoretical approach that pulled researchers from Filter theories with Kahneman's published 1973 study, Attention and Effort positing attention was limited in overall capacity, that a person's ability to perform simultaneous tasks depends on how much capacity the jobs require. Note that the amount of available capacity and the amount of attention demanded by each task to be performed may increase or decrease, a change that would be represented in this diagram by changing the sizes of the appropriate circles. What Makes Certain Features More Distinctive than Others? Kahneman - central capacity theory Kahneman (1973) has proposed a limited capacity model of attention which has a central processor that allocates attention (see Figure 1). For an excellent review and discussion of the history and evolution of attention theories, see Neumann (1996). He then argued that mental effort reflects variations in processing . Noise is Kahneman's term for the natural variability humans bring to decision making and the subject of his new book, which he wrote with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein. An attentional approach that stems from the capacity models of attention is the mental effort approach (Kahneman, 1973 ). Each of these activities requires attention and must be carried out in the course of a few seconds. All the players included head fixations during these phases. The results of the eye movement recordings showed that novice drivers concentrated their eye fixations in a small area more immediately in front of the car. Rationale. More experienced drivers visually searched a wider area that was farther from the front of the car. These cues get attended to, but rather than having been actively searched for, they were detected by the performer as relevant to the situation, which then influenced the performer's movements accordingly. Is it preferable to focus attention on one's own movements (internal focus) or on the effects of one's own movements (external focus)? The allocation of resources is influenced by several factors related to the person and the activities. The answer to this question comes from the study of attention as it relates to the performance of multiple activities at the same time. Some examples of these activities include (a) the visual search of the environment to assess the environmental context regulatory characteristics associated with performing a skill; (b) the use of tau when moving toward an object to make or avoid contact with it, or when an object is moving toward a person who needs to catch or strike it; (c) the storing of information in memory and the retrieval of information from memory; (d) the selection of an action to perform and the movement characteristics that must be applied to carry out the action; and (e) the actual production of an action. Although the original research involved rats, many subsequent studies established its relevance to humans. They monitored eye movements of novice and experienced drivers as they watched various driving-related scenes that included at least one dangerous situation. This is described by Kahneman below. (For a discussion of the neural basis of selective attention, see Yantis, 2008.). These strategies are often acquired without specific training and without the person's conscious awareness of the strategies they use. van Gemmert, Because of the abundance of research showing the performance benefit of an external focus of attention for numerous motor skills, the authors hypothesized that an external focus of attention would yield longer jumps than an internal focus for the standing long jump. action effect hypothesis the proposition that actions are best planned and controlled by their intended effects. With respect to automaticity and attention, Kahneman proposes two systems that operate differently but interactively, to help us solve problems, of which we have included performing a motor skill. Unfortunately, it was not until the 1950s that researchers began to try to provide a theoretical basis for this type of behavioral evidence. For example, detecting performance-related information in the environment as we perform a skill can be an attention-demanding activity. For example, in a comparison of driving performance while conversing on a cell phone, conversing with a passenger, and having no conversation, researchers at the University of Utah found that when drivers engaged in cell phone conversations, they increased their driving errors (Drews, Pasupathi, & Strayer, 2008). Performance of a skill w/ little/no demand on attention. As a person walks from one end of a hallway to the other, he or she must listen to words spoken through earphones; when the person hears each word, he or she must repeat the word that was spoken just prior to that word (i.e., the secondary task is a short-term memory task that involves interference during the retention interval). D., & Abernethy, The special benefits of divided attention and parallel processing across the attributes of a single object, which have emerged from object-based theory of attention (Chen, Citation 2012; Kahneman & Treisman, Citation 1984) have also spawned important applications of the object display to represent multi-dimensional data. Why? This is a description of how demanding the processing of a particular input might be. In addition, the experienced drivers tended to be less variable in where they fixated their eye movements while watching the driving scenes, which, in agreement with the findings of Mourant and Rockwell (1972), indicates their greater knowledge of which environmental cues to look at to obtain the most relevant information. Finally, more recent attention theories have moved away from the concept of a central capacity limit to one that emphasizes the selection and integration of information and activities associated with the various functional aspects of human performance, such as those depicted in figure 9.1. (a) Discuss the similarities and differences between fixed and flexible central-resource theories of attention capacity. Kahneman's (2011) most recent views of automaticity are presented in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Next, consider as smaller circles the specific tasks that require these resources, such as driving a car (task A) and talking with a friend (task B). Do we visually select relevant environmental cues according to our action intentions and goals, or do we visually attend to environmental cues because of their distinctiveness or meaningfulness in the situation? P., Daitch, Strayer, A widely held view of the relationship between arousal and performance is that it takes the form of an inverted U. Another aspect of attention occurs when you need to visually select and attend to specific features of the environmental context before actually carrying out an action. As a result, to maintain safe driving, the person must reduce the resource demand of the conversation activity. Conclusion and application: The results support the benefit of an external focus of attention for performing the standing long jump. (2007). Indicate how you would take the concept of attention capacity into account in designing this instructional strategy. This limited capacity for paying attention has been conceptualized as a bottleneck, which restricts the flow of information. Fu, multiple resource theory. These are the same two sources involved in providing attentional resources for carrying on a conversation with a friend. Vickers interpreted this finding as evidence that the near experts did not fixate long enough just prior to the release of the ball for the shots they made or missed to allow them to attain the shooting percentage of the expert. The most prominent among the first theories addressing attention limitations1 was the filter theory of attention, sometimes referred to as the bottleneck theory. You're probably already familiar with the experience of heuristics. To determine whether to shoot, pass, or dribble in soccer, the player must use visual search that is different from that involved in the situations described above. Describe how you can simultaneously perform these multiple activities by identifying what you think about, what you do not think about, and what you visually focus on as you perform these activities. In Kahneman's model (see figure 9.3), the single source of our mental resources from which we derive cognitive effort is presented as a "central pool" of resources (i.e., available capacity) that has a flexible capacity. VU. You will see a variety of examples of the use of the dual-task procedure in this chapter and others in this book. Failures to ignore entirely irrelevant distractors: The role of load. A CLOSER LOOK An Attention-Capacity Explanation of the Arousal-Performance Relationship. Discuss two different dual-task techniques that researchers use to assess the attention demands of performing a motor skill. A generic information-processing model on which filter theories of attention were based. For example, the movement component of passing a soccer ball may require no attention capacity because it can be performed automatically, but the preparation for making the pass (recall the discussion related to action preparation in chapter 8) may demand full attention capacity. [Based on discussion in Goulet, C. et al. But, some problems require more effort to solve; they require effortful mental activities that are also influenced by experience and practice. What do you do? Finally, three general rules influence how people allocate attentional resources. This view of a visual search process fits well with the research evidence you saw in chapter 7 that showed the influence of various object and environment features on prehension movement kinematics. The research evidence for the "quiet eye" is based on the use of eye movement recording technology, which was discussed in chapter 6. To visit the website of the laboratory of one of the authors of the research on the effect of video games on visual attention (Green & Bavelier, 2003), and to experience the tasks involved in these and related experiments, go to http://cms.unige.ch/fapse/people/bavelier, To watch a video of the "invisible gorilla experiment" (referred to in this video as the "monkey business illusion"), which demonstrates how focusing visual attention on a specific feature of a situation can keep you from observing other features in the scene (known as "inattentional blindness"), go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY, To read a ScienceDaily.com story "Distracted driving up among students," go to http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120424120448.htm. Farrow, As you read in chapter 6, eye movement recordings track the location of central vision while people observe a scene. Expertise differences in preparing to return a tennis serve: A visual information processing approach. 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