If we want to move information from the sensory register into working memory, it appears that, at least in most cases, we must pay attention to it (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968; Cowan, 1995; M. I.
Posner & Rothbart, 2007). For example, as you read this book, you’re probably attending to only a small part of the visual input your eyes are receiving from your environment (I hope you’re attending to the words on this page!). In the same way, you don’t worry about all of the sounds you hear at any particular time; you select only certain sounds to pay attention to. In essence, information that a learner pays attention to moves on to working memory, whereas information that isn’t attended to may be lost from the memory system.
One reason people don’t remember something they’ve seen or heard, then, is that they never really paid attention to it. If you’re sitting in class with your mind a thousand miles away from the professor’s lecture, you might say that you forgot what the instructor said, or you might say that you never heard it in the first place. The reality of the situation is somewhere in between: The lecture reached your sensory register but wasn’t sufficiently processed to move on to your working memory.
Even when people pay attention to a particular stimulus, they don’t necessarily attend to its most important aspects. 5 Such is especially the case with complex stimuli, such as reading mate-
rials (e.g., Faust & Anderson, 1967). Once, when I was teaching introductory psychology to first-year college students, a young woman who had failed my first two exams came to my office expressing frustration about her lack of success in my class. When I asked her to describe how she went about completing the assigned readings in the textbook, she told me, “Well, I start looking through the chapter, and when I get to a page that looks important, I read it.” With fur- ther probing, I discovered that this young woman had been reading only about one out of every three pages assigned.
Factors Influencing Attention
Certain kinds of stimuli tend to draw attention, whereas other kinds don’t (Craik, 2006; M. I. Posner & Rothbart, 2007; Rakison, 2003). Following are several factors affecting what people pay attention to and therefore what they store in working memory.
Motion Imagine that you’ve agreed to meet some friends at a carnival. When you first see your friends in the crowd, you might wave one or both arms wildly about to get their attention. Moving objects are more likely to capture attention than stationery ones (Abrams & Christ, 2003; L. E. Bahrick, Gogate, & Ruiz, 2002).
Size Which of the following letters first draw your eye? A
B
C DE
F GYou probably noticed the B and E before the other letters because of their larger size. Attention tends to be drawn to large objects, a principle that newspaper publishers apply when they type- set front-page headlines in
large letters
and that advertisers take advantage of when they put potentially unenticing information in fine print.5 Behaviorists have referred to this issue as one of a nominal stimulus (what is presented to the learner) versus an effective stimulus (what the learner is actually attending to).
Intensity More intense stimuli—bright colors and loud noises, for instance—attract attention. Teachers frequently speak more loudly than usual— “Be quiet!” —when they want to get students’ attention. Similarly, toy manufacturers use bright colors in the toys they produce, knowing that young children browsing store shelves will be more attracted to vivid reds and yellows than to subtle pinks and beiges.
Novelty Stimuli that are novel or unusual in some way tend to draw people’s attention (M. Hofer, 2010; K. A. Snyder, 2007). For example, look at the women in Figure 8.2 . You probably find yourself paying more attention to the woman on the right than to the other three. A gal with two heads and three legs doesn’t come along very often.
Incongruity Objects that don’t make sense within their context tend to capture people’s attention (Craik, 2006). For example, read this sentence:
I took a walk to the rabbit this morning.
Did you spend more time looking at the word rabbit than at the other words? If so, it may have
been because rabbit is incongruous with the rest of the sentence.
Social cues Again imagine yourself at that carnival I mentioned earlier. You’ve now connected with your friends and are in line to ride through the Spook House. Suddenly many people in front of you gasp as they look up at the Death-Defying Triple Loop-the-Loop off to the right. Almost certainly you’ll follow their line of sight to discover why they’re gasping. People are more likely to pay attention to things they see others looking at and reacting to (D. A. Baldwin, 2000;
Gauvain, 2001; Kingstone, Smilek, Ristic, Friesen, & Eastwood, 2003). Even infants rely on such social cues, as you’ll discover in our discussion of social referencing in Chapter 13 .
Emotion Stimuli with strong emotional associations attract attention. A naked person running through a crowded room usually draws the attention (and astonished expressions) of just about everyone present. Words such as blood and murder also are attention getters because of their emo-
tional overtones. Of course, some emotionally laden stimuli also have personal significance—our final attention-getting factor.
Personal significance As a general rule, the factors I’ve just listed tend to capture attention but don’t necessarily hold it for very long. In contrast, personal significance—–the meaning and relevance people find in an object or event—can both capture and maintain attention (Barkley,
1996; Craik, 2006; S. Kaplan & Berman, 2010). When a student sits in front of a television set
Figure 8.2
with an open textbook, the stimulus the student attends to—the television or the book—depends in large part on which stimulus is more closely related to the student’s motives at the time. If the textbook is interesting or if an important exam is scheduled for the next day, the student will attend to the book. But if a popular situation comedy or a cliff-hanging soap opera is playing, or if the textbook is dry and unenticing, the student may very well forget that the text is even in the same room.
Think, for a moment, about curriculum materials, including textbooks, that you’ve seen recently. Do they have characteristics that are apt to catch a student’s eye? Do important words and concepts stand out, perhaps because they’re
larger
or more intense or unusual? Are cer- tain topics likely to grab a student’s interest because they’re interesting and relevant to the age- group? If your answer to these questions is no , then students may very well have difficultyattending to and learning from those materials.
Nature of Attention
What do we actually do—mentally, that is—when we want to pay attention to something? On the surface, the answer might seem simple: “I just focus my eyes on the object,” you might think. Yet you can probably recall times when you’ve directed your eyes toward a specific object but paid no attention to it at all: Perhaps you were listening intently to a piece of music or were deep in thought about something that wasn’t anywhere in sight (e.g., Mack, 2003). Furthermore, peo- ple can focus their attention in at least one sensory modality—hearing—without having to phys- ically orient themselves in a particular direction. For example, you can go to a social gathering where numerous conversations are going on and successfully attend to just one of them, regard- less of where your ears are “aimed.” You might be listening to the person standing directly in front of you, or, if that person has been rambling on for more than an hour about the trouble he has growing rhubarb, you might instead tune in to a more interesting conversation a few feet to your right or left. Even though you’re looking directly at the rhubarb grower and nodding in mock agreement, your attention is somewhere else altogether.
The ability to attend to one spoken message while ignoring others—aptly called the cocktail
party phenomenon —has been studied using a technique called shadowing: A person wears ear-
phones to listen to two simultaneously spoken messages and is asked to repeat one of them. Accurately repeating one of the messages is fairly easy when the two people speaking have very different voices, are talking about different topics, and are presenting their messages from seem- ingly different directions. It becomes far more difficult—sometimes impossible—when the two voices, topics, or apparent locations of the speakers are similar (Cherry, 1953). Furthermore, people who shadow one of two messages notice very little of the other message; perhaps they notice whether the other speaker is male or female, but they can seldom report any of the words included in the unattended message and typically don’t even notice whether the message is spo- ken in their native tongue (Cherry, 1953).
Given such findings, some early cognitive psychologists likened auditory attention to a
filter: A listener uses physical characteristics to select one message and screen out others, much
as a radio zeroes in on one frequency and shuts out the rest (e.g., Broadbent, 1958). Yet subse- quent research has shown that people don’t totally filter out information from a supposedly unattended message (J. A. Gray & Wedderburn, 1960; Heatherton, Macrae, & Kelley, 2004; Treisman, 1964). People who participate in shadowing experiments notice especially meaning- ful words—for instance, their own names—in the unattended message. They also hear words
that fit meaningfully into the attended message. For example, suppose you hear these two sentences simultaneously and are asked to shadow only the first one:
Speaker 1: I bought candy at the plate today.
Speaker 2: Put the rhubarb on my store, please.
You might very well “hear” the first speaker say, “I bought candy at the store today” (borrowing the word store from the second speaker) because that sentence makes more sense than what the
speaker actually said.
Although most psychologists now reject the idea that attention is like a filter, they continue to have trouble pinning down its precise nature. It almost certainly involves both automatic responses (e.g., immediately turning to look in the direction of a loud, unexpected noise) and conscious control (e.g., deciding which conversation to listen to at a cocktail party). 6 It also
involves learning to some degree; in particular, people learn that certain kinds of stimuli are important and that others can easily be ignored (Kruschke, 2003). In general, you might think of attention as being focused cognitive processing of particular aspects of the environment (Barkley, 1996;
Cowan, 1995; Johnston, McCann, & Remington, 1995).
Attention’s Limited Capacity
Perhaps learning would be easier if people could attend to everything they record in their sensory
registers. Unfortunately, people aren’t capable of attending to everything at once. For example, look at Figure 8.3 . At first glance, you probably see a white goblet. But if you look at the black spaces on either side of the goblet, you should also be able to see two silhouettes (“Peter” and “Paul”) staring at each other.
Now try this: See if you can focus on both the goblet and the two silhouettes at exactly the
same time, so that you can clearly see the details of both. Can you do it? Most people can’t attend to the goblet and the faces at exactly the same time, although they may be able to shift their focus from the goblet to the faces and back again very quickly. The Peter–Paul goblet illustrates a phe- nomenon that early Gestalt psychologists called figure–ground : When people are focusing on
Figure 8.3
The Peter–Paul goblet
6 The hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain all have some involvement in attention. The reticular formation, hippocampus, and frontal and parietal lobes of the cortex are especially important (see Chapter 2 ).
the details of one object (the figure ), they cannot also inspect other things in their line of sight— things that become the background (or ground ) for the object. People may notice a few salient characteristics of background items (e.g., their color) but gain little other information about them. 7 From this perspective, the only way to gain detailed information about two or more items
would be to shift the focus of attention from one item to another.
But now consider a situation in which you’re driving your car while also carrying on a conversation with a friend. Certainly you’re attending to two things—the road and the conversation— at once. To account for such a situation, many theorists describe attention as involving a limited
processing capacity , with the number of stimuli being attended to depending on how much cognitive processing is required for each one (e.g., J. R. Anderson, 2005: Cowan, 2007; Pashler, 1992; Sergeant, 1996). If you’re engaging in a difficult task, such as learning how to drive a car with a standard transmission, you may very well need to devote your full attention to that task and so not hear a thing your friend is telling you. However, if you’re doing something more habitual or automatic, such as driving a standard transmission after years of driving experience, you can easily devote some attention to what your friend is saying. Many tasks, such as driving, become increasingly automatic over time, therefore requiring less and less of our attention (I’ll say more about this phenomenon, known as automaticity , in Chapter 9 ). Even so, when peo-
ple carry on a conversation while driving (say, on a cell phone), they have slower reaction times and are less likely to notice traffic signals (Strayer & Drews, 2007; Strayer & Johnston, 2001). Occasionally, people do become adept at splitting their attention among two complex tasks, but only when they have considerable practice in performing both tasks at the same time, ideally making the execution of one or both of them automatic (Lien, Ruthruff, & Johnston, 2006; Schumacher et al., 2001; Spelke, Hirst, & Neisser, 1976).
Regardless of how we view attention, one thing is clear: People’s ability to attend to the stimuli around them is limited, such that they usually can’t attend to or otherwise learn from two complex situations at the same time. Thus, learners must be quite selective about the information they choose to process, and they must ignore—and so lose—much of the information they receive.
Attention is closely connected with working memory, although theorists continue to debate
how closely the two are linked (e.g., Cowan, 2007; Downing, 2000; Woodman, Vogel, & Luck,
2001). As you’ll see now, working memory controls attention to some extent, and it, like attention, has a limited capacity.