Attention
The world isn’t neatly carved into units aligned with our mental representations. Instead it’s presumably a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Presumably the goal of attention is to filter this confusion such that we can better process signals in the environment.
Primary Readings
Everyone should read these and be prepared to discuss.
| Posner, M. I., Snyder, R. R. and Davidson, B. J. (1978) | Attention and Detection of Signals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 109(2), 160. |
| Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, L. & Polosukhin, I. (2017). | Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30.Depending on your background, this paper will either be tough to understand or extremely well known to you. It has been cited 86,000 times in the five years since its publication, so worthy of discussion either way. This is what attention now means in machine learning. Interesting to think about how it relates to the psychological notion. |
Secondary Readings
The presenter should read and incorporate at least two of these.
| Treisman, A. and Gelade, G. (1980) | A feature integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12(1), 97-136.The article proposes a feature-integration theory of attention, which suggests that attention must be directed sequentially to each stimulus in a display when multiple features are needed to distinguish objects. The study focuses on exploring the relationship between attention and feature integration in perception. It introduces diagnostic tests for determining the separability of dimensions and conducts experiments to support the theory of feature integration. The study also examines visual search, texture segregation, illusory conjunctions, identity and location perception, and interference from unattended stimuli. The research examines the effects of extended practice on feature unitization and the emergence of unitary detectors. |
| Henderson, J. M., (2020) | Meaning and attention in scenes. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 73, 95-117.In this chapter, the author discusses the role of meaning and attention in scenes. They introduce a new method called meaning maps, which represent the spatial distribution of meaning in scenes and compare it to image salience and attention. The author found that both meaning and salience predict attention, but meaning uniquely accounts for variance in attention. They discuss the implications of these findings and highlight the importance of understanding how the brain solves the computational problems of processing visual scenes. |
| Paschler, H. (1994) | Dual-task interference in simple tasks: Data and theory. Psychological Bulletin, 116(2), 220.The article explores the concept of dual-task interference in simple tasks. It discusses different theoretical approaches for explaining dual-task interference, including capacity sharing, bottleneck models, and cross-talk models. The article also discusses the implications for higher mental processes and provides an overview of previous research on dual-task performance. The article discusses the psychological refractory period (PRP) effect, which refers to a delay in response time to a second stimulus when presented shortly after the first stimulus. The article explores various explanations for this effect and highlights the need to analyze the time course of mental operations to understand interference mechanisms. The article discusses bottleneck models and how they can be tested using PRP experiments. It outlines principles for determining if there is a bottleneck in a particular stage of a task. The article suggests the existence of a bottleneck in response selection and certain cognitive operations. |
Questions under discussion
- Is attention a spotlight, object-oriented, or perhaps something more?
- How is attention allocated?
