Metaphors and Models of Attention in Cognitive Psychology

Psychologist Dr. Doping speaks about the limitations of attention, the filter model and the factors distribution of attentional resources.

Research focus and attention as the focus of our mental activity in cognitive psychology began, like all other studies in the context of technical metaphors of human knowledge, in the context of the metaphor of information processing computer or radio transmission of information. And what can we say about any technical device? It is limited, it has some limitations on the central processing of information. And researchers have suggested that it was because of these restrictions, and there are errors in our knowledge, which we blamed on a lack of care. And the first question for cognitive psychologists attention was the question of how, and that it is generally for the restrictions and whether they. If we answer this question in the affirmative, we say that our knowledge is the central limit, just as they are in any technical device. We have two tracks on which we can build further research. First, we can assume that this limits our knowledge of structural or has limited bandwidth. That is somewhere in the processing of information a person has a "bottleneck", through which all incoming information simply crawls. What to do? Trying somehow is a "bottleneck" to protect, advance discarding or blocking of the information. What could perform such a function? For example, a filter, similar to those used in radio engineering. And the first metaphor of attention in cognitive psychology has become a metaphor of attention as a filter. Naturally, it resulted in a number of research questions, "Where is this filter", "How the filter works?", And the logic of these questions were based on the study.

On the other hand, we can say that the restrictions have the character of energy. As to the urban grid, we can not connect more appliances than it allows, and to our knowledge we can not carry out more operations than can run simultaneously without disturbing, with no errors in their implementation. If we say that the restrictions have the character of energy, we can say that there must be attention and there is a mental effort or limited activation, which we distributed to the various processes of refining, supply, of course, the distribution mechanism. Then, of course, we will study some attention as the distribution of resources among the concurrently executing tasks.

And we can say that in fact no one has proven that the brain is limited, no one has proven that the brain is like a technical device. Maybe there are no restrictions, all the selectivity of our attention - it's really just selective perception, which is based on a schematic representation of reality. It is in this scheme, we absorb new information, it sends a further activity, and the ability to combine several objectives - it is only the coordination of the schemes and the corresponding data collection and processing cycles with each other.

This position was taken by Ulric Neisser. However, his work was in some ways marginalized, and the two main lines of research is still consistent with the study of a structural or energy constraints in human cognition. And, in fact, the largest series of studies is concerned the study of attention as a selection that directs filter model.

The answer to the question of where the filter was not so obvious, because if we put too early and throw too much information at the early stages of analysis, we can lose something important. On the other hand, if we put the filter is too late, as we were well treated with a large amount of information, then why do we need it? We have already spent enough resources and processing time.

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How to do research? The basic model proposed American acoustics engineer Colin Cherry, who in 1950 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology puzzled question, but as a man shared several superimposed on each other's posts? About the same when we are sitting at a party where a lot of people at the same time says, we may well hear a conversation. This phenomenon is described in the late XIX century by William James, American psychologist. And in fact, it has several other aspects. For example, we can hear our interlocutor, but we as well hear our name pronounced across the room. But Cherry was interested in the ability to choose one channel - a task with which the machine is not coping very well, and the man, as studies have shown, quite effectively. Cherry worked with the subjects-people, asking them to listen to one of the two posts at the same time supplied to the headphones. It could be just two superposed messages, or one message at the right ear and the other to the left. And the man is usually asked to answer some questions about the one message, retell its content or repeat it aloud, ignoring the second. But in fact, Cherry tried to understand and from the second a man that sees? It turned out that almost nothing. Notices change male voice to a female, notes that the message is cut off, says, when, instead of voting begins noise or hear a dial tone, but it does not see any sense messages, no matter what language it was, or when the language is changed, not even the fact that the message scrolls backwards. On the basis of this Cherry concluded that, apparently, our attention as a filter - a mechanism located very early, in the early stages of information processing on the physical attributes processing level. And if we have something to throw away, the content is not exactly handle. Although it has been found that when snapped filing messages, then the person may report, and on the same channel, and on the other. However, it says only that appear somewhere before the filter has a buffer, wherein information is retained for a very short time. Actually, it is a model with a touch buffer channel with limited bandwidth and a filter between the Englishman Donald Broadbent proposed in the 1950s, and it was the first model of attention as an early selection.

But immediately began to accumulate facts that appear to be the selection is not as early or arranged in some other way. For example, the very fact that a person can find his name on the second channel, for which he does not pay attention, says that this name should be handled somehow. And if you say, "Bob, switch to another channel," a person easily does. Also detected and emotive stimuli may even establish links between the messages, if they are somehow related to each other in meaning. And if so, we need to either move the filter in the later stages of information processing, as did, for example, Diane and Anthony Deutsch and Donald Norman, or change the principle of operation of the filter, which offered the British at that time researcher Anne Treisman. She suggested that the filter does not work on the principle of a complete cut-off of information, and on the basis of its attenuation. The weakening is carried out at the entrance to our "mental dictionary", or the mental lexicon. If there comes unmitigated message, it activates the appropriate units, they come to our minds, we have to be accountable. If the units of our "mental dictionary" reaches a weakened signal, it is not activated. But if this unit a low threshold for activation, such as, for example, in our own name or any emotionally meaningful words, or if the unit is activated some messages that have been filtered before, when we establish a connection between what we say in the right ear, and what they say in the left ear, it can also be activated and it is to break into the consciousness.

But Deutsch and Norman decided that the filter inlet in principle is not necessary. We can put a filter at the output of the information processing system after a complete semantic processing, then "mental dictionary", or our long-term memory system. But for this we besides the input signal must still prevent the existence of an additional unit, which determines the relevance or importance of the objects of those stimuli which act to us. This may be due either to our intentions, or with the structure of the language, but we are able to explain not only the attention of the sensor associated with external influences, but also mental. Can, for example, to explain some paradoxical effects in our knowledge. For example, why do we think of the yellow monkey, when we are asked not to think about it? And the thing is that we are constantly checking ourselves that we do not think about the yellow monkey, activate it via the unit "relevance", because it makes its way through late filter at the output of the memory system.

However, the data accumulated on both sides - to support early selection and a late support. Finally, the researchers decided that, apparently, a lot of filters. The model will be flexible and multiple selection - assumed that the selection depends on the task set before man. If the semantic information is required, we'll get it. If not, you can throw in advance, not wasting resources.

In fact, the same fate befell the attention model as a distribution of mental effort as the distribution of resources. The first was a model of common resources of attention, proposed by American psychologist Daniel Kahneman Israeli origin - the one who later studied the human mind and its mistakes. Kahneman suggested that the focus of our resources - this is actually available for cognitive operations, the level of activation of our body, our brain. Not everyone goes to knowledge, but part of the resources spent on cognitive operations, and this part is limited.

Accordingly, Kahneman as units of its model postulates a very limited activation policy of its distribution and processing of those processes or activities for which it is distributed. This hierarchy of his model. And then he describes the factors that affect the distribution of resources: our current intentions - what we need now, we have a permanent disposition (name called - turn around, falling bricks - otprygni, drop everything you're doing), and finally, evaluation request from the tasks carried out by us. If they are just above the resources available, it is possible to raise a modicum of their level. But if you exceed all possible limits, we have to throw one of the activities that we are starting to make a lot of mistakes in one of the parallel tasks. Kahneman is testing his model in experiments with double tasks, one of which is through the payment of fines and makes it more important, less than a second, and shows that increasing the number of errors in the second when changing the difficulty level of the first problem. When the level of difficulty is reduced, errors in the second problem becomes smaller. Interestingly, also behaves pupil diameter that actually suggests that activation, apparently has not only psychological but also physiological nature.

But then the researchers began to discover problems that are combined with each other for better or worse. It turned out that even a very similar problem when slightly varying the method of presenting information (visual or hearing), with slightly varying the method of response (speech or motor) are combined with each other for better or worse. We started to talk about the fact that, apparently, we do not have a box with resources and more. Eventually we came to models or multiple resource components. But the problem is that as soon as we find new combined with each other problems, we have to add some kind of n plus the first resource of attention, that multiplies the number of resources in our models to infinity. That is why modern psychology, on the one hand, the greater was the approach to the treatment of attention as a mechanism that is linked directly to the task and is built under it, and with another - all gone from the metaphor of the filter and reservoir of resources or power. Most current research is actually conducted in the logic of the third metaphor that combines features of the other two - a metaphor for a searchlight that is, on the one hand, selects a piece of information from the outside world, and on the other - increases the processing of this information. It is in the logic of the spotlight metaphor are built all the modern study of visual attention, visual search study, the redirection of attention, and so on, which is probably dominate in modern cognitive psychology.