Attention
Findings on attention from Steven Pinker’s introductory psychology lectures. Other entries build on these.
Two ways the mind processes
- Parallel: many things at once. The brain handles incoming stimuli of different kinds at the same time, such as color, motion, shape, and depth.
- Serial: one thing at a time. Whatever needs focal attention goes through this bottleneck.
Feature integration theory
Anne Treisman and Garry Gelade, 1980.
- Single features are registered “early, automatically, and in parallel”.
- A target that differs by one feature pops out, however many distractors surround it. Think of a red dot among green ones.
- A target defined by a conjunction of features does not pop out. Wikipedia’s example is a green X among purple Xs and green Os. Joining the features takes focal attention, which is serial, so the search slows as the crowd grows.
Attention and awareness
- In the lectures, attention is a necessary condition for consciousness.
- Inattentional blindness is the proof. In a famous study, people busy with a visual task failed to notice a person in a gorilla costume walking through the scene.
The global workspace
Bernard Baars, 1988.
- Consciousness works like a blackboard. Baars took the idea from early artificial-intelligence systems in which independent programs shared information on one.
- Only a small, relevant subset of information is posted.
- What is posted is shared among mid-level perception, language, memory, and planning.
- In the lectures, the brain side of this is connectivity to the frontal lobes.
What reaches the blackboard, and what never does, is covered under Consciousness.
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