Elizabeth A. Styles Also available as a printed book

232 Pages·2006·1.46 MB·English

THE
PSYCHOLOGY
OF ATTENTION
Elizabeth A. Styles
Also available as a printed book
see title verso for ISBN details
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATTENTION

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
ATTENTION
Elizabeth A.Styles
Buckinghamshire College, Bucks, UK
HOVE AND NEW YORK
This edition published in The Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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Copyright © 1997 by Psychology Press Ltd. a member of The Taylor & Francis
group
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform,
retrieval system, or any other means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-203-01643-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-86377-464-4 (hbk)
ISBN 0-86377-465-2 (pbk)
Contents
Preface vii
1. Introduction 1
2. Early work on attention 10
3. Selective report and interference effects in visual attention 26
4. The nature of visual attention 48
5. Combining the attributes of objects and visual search 69
6. Selection for action 92
7. Task combination and divided attention 108
8. Automaticity, skill, and expertise 122
9. Intentional control and willed behaviour 142
10. The problems of consciousness 165
11. Epilogue 185
References 188
Author index 205
Subject index 215

Preface
I know from my students that cognitive psychology fills some of them with dread. They
see it as the difficult side of psychology, full of facts that don't quite fit any theory.
Cognition does not have the immediate appeal of social or developmental psychology to
which, they say, they can relate more easily through personal experience. However,
towards the end of a course, they begin to see how the pieces of the jigsaw fit together,
and exclaim. 'This is interesting. Why didn't you tell us this to start with?". The trouble
is that, until you have put together some of the pieces, it is difficult to see even a part of
what the overall picture is. Next, the parts of the picture have to be put in the right place.
With respect to attention, no one yet knows exactly what the picture we are building
looks like: this makes work on attention particularly exciting and challenging. We may
have some of the pieces in the wrong place, or be thinking of the wrong overall picture.
In this book I hope you will find some pieces that fit together and see how some of the
pieces have had to be moved as further evidence is brought to light; and I hope you see.
from the eveiyday example of attentional behaviour in the introduction, that we can relate
to cognitive psychology just as well as to social psychology. Attention is with us all the
time.
The primary motivation for this book was that my undergraduates were unable to find
a suitable text on attention to support lectures, tutorials and seminars. My second
motivation was that most chapters in general cognitive psychology texts tend to
concentrate on the original early work on selective attention done in the 1960s, dual-task
performance work from the 1970s and feature integration theory (FIT) from 1980. These
aspects are important, but research on attention includes far more than this; in fact, so
much more, that to gather it all into an undergraduate text is impossible. As cognitive
neuroscience moves ahead, bringing together traditional experimental work,
neuropsychological studies and computational modelling, the prospect for a better
understanding of attention is coming nearer. At the same time, the range of evidence that
needs to be considered has increased far beyond that which was accounted for by the
original theories. However. I believe that in the end there will be a solution. As we
understand more about the brain and the way it works, we are beginning to see how
attentional behaviour may emerge as a property of complex underlying processing.
In choosing what to include, I have necessarily been selective and am sure to have
omitted some work that others would see as essential. The selection of work I have made
is bound to be influenced by the years I spent at the University of Oxford, first as a student and then as a colleague of two great thinkers in attention; Alan Allport and the late
Donald Broadbent. Their energy, enthusiasm, wisdom and kindness inspired my own
interest in attention. I acknowledge my debt to them here.
In writing the final version of this book I have been helped considerably by the
extremely constructive comments of the reviewers. I should like to thank Alan Allport.
Glyn Humphreys, Hermann Muller and an anonymous reviewer for their time and effort.
Liz Styles.
Oxford, 1997.
1
Introduction
What is attention?
Any reader who turns to a book with the word attention in the title, might be forgiven for
or thinking that the author would have a clear idea or precise definition of what attention
actually is. Unfortunately, attention is a concept that psychologists have been particularly
reluctant to define. Despite William James's (1890) oft-quoted remark that "Everyone
knows what attention is", it would be closer to the truth to say that "Nobody knows what
attention is" or at least not all psychologists agree. The problem is that attention is not a
single concept, but the name for a variety of psychological phenomena.
We can easily see some of the many varieties of attention in the common usage of the
word when we apply the same word to different situations and experiences. Let's take an
everyday example. While we are out walking in a wood, I tell you that I have just seen an
unusual variety of butterfly land on the back of the leaf in a nearby tree. I point out the
tree and whereabout the leaf is. and tell you to pay attention to it. Following my
instruction you are able to select one tree from many and then attend to a particular leaf,
rather than the tree itself, so presumably you and I share some common understanding of
what attention is. You continue to look carefully, hoping you will see the butterfly when
it moves out from behind the leaf. Now. you will try to keep your attention on that leaf so
as not to miss the butterfly when it appears. In addition, you will have some expectation
of what the butterfly will look like and how it may behave and you'll be monitoring for
these features. This expectation and anticipation will activate what psychologists call top-
down processes which will enable you to be more ready to respond if a butterfly appears
rather than some dissimilar animal—say, a caterpillar. However, if while you are
selectively focusing attention on the leaf an apple suddenly falls out of another part of the
tree, you will be distracted. In other words, your attention will be automatically captured
by the apple. In order to continue observing the leaf, you must re-engage your attention to
where it was before. After a time you detect the beautiful butterfly as it flutters round the
leaf: it sits a minute and you watch it as it flies away.
In this example we have a variety of attentional phenomena that psychologists need to
understand, and if possible explain, in well-defined scientific terms. We shall see that no
single term is appropriate to explain all the phenomena of attention and control even in
this visual task. Let's look at what you were asked to do. First of all. I asked you to attend
to a leaf. In order to do this simple task, there had to be some kind of setting up of your