Chapter 1 Background

Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in a clear and vivid form of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal with others

That was William James, a founder of modern psychology, writing in 1890. In the quote, he appeals to common sense — “every one knows”. Common sense was relevant because although attention had hardly been studied scientifically at that point, some things about attention had nevertheless been understood for a very long time.

Scammers are one class of people that long ago worked out some things about attention, so that they could better exploit people. This painting was created four hundred years ago. It shows a young man getting duped in a card game by two conmen. The conman in front is assisted by an older conman who looks over the victim’s shoulder. That conman in the back signals something about the cards to the younger conman, who reaches behind his back to pull a new card from his breeches.

It’s not just scammers who knew how to manipulate the attention of people. In experimenting with painting, artists had also worked certain things about how to direct a viewer’s attention.

Much of the knowledge of attention possessed by painters, and by con men, was implicit rather than spelt out. Science is about spelling things out, confirming them with data, and discovering new things. It was only in the twentieth century that scientists began doing extensive experimentation on attention, but even then attention was studied very little relative to memory, perception, or cognition.

There is still much for science to learn about attention. A good starting point continues to be common-sense understanding of attention - which is sometimes called folk psychology. Some aspects of folk psychology have become embedded in our language. For example:

• Please “pay attention!”
  • Implies that one has to choose something (often the teacher) to fully process its signals.
• “Sorry, I wasn’t listening”
  • In English, there’s a difference between hearing something and listening to it. Not listening means although it may have been processed by our ears, we either didn’t experience it or didn’t retain it.
• “Sorry, I missed that.”
  • People sometimes say this after someone else says something and the first person realizes that they didn’t understand what was said. In particular, people say it when they don’t think the problem was that the statement was not loud enough for them to hear. Instead, the problem is often something with attention.
• “I didn’t notice that.” What do you think people might mean when they say that rather than choosing to instead say “I didn’t see that.”?

Failures to notice things explain a substantial proportion of accidents such as car crashes. But why do we have to pay attention to comprehend or retain some information? That is the subject of two coming chapters (3, 4).

If you took PSYC1 at the University of Sydney, you already heard Caleb Owens’ “Cognitive Processes 2” lectures on visual attention, which were related to what you will learn here. Caleb’s lectures had the following learning outcomes:

• Understand and be able to give examples of situations where focused visual or auditory attention leads to limited processing of other stimuli.
• Be able to define, distinguish and give examples of focused attention, divided attention, diffused attention, inattentional blindness, and change blindness.
• Understand and be able to describe the difference between an early, late or flexible locus of selection.
• Be able to both give and interpret examples which demonstrate an early, late or flexible locus of selection.
• Be able to define and distinguish between endogenous and exogenous attention
• Understand the role of attention according to Treisman’s FIT (feature integration theory) and the visual search evidence (for both feature and conjunction targets) which supports it.

This year has its own list of learning outcomes (2).

We will review material from Caleb’s lecture, bring new ideas to bear on it, and add more material. In the parts that review Caleb’s points, we will go quickly.