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Course Documents/PSY 540 Transcript for Psychology of Attention Explained.docx

PSY 540 Transcript for Psychology of Attention Explained

Hello, everyone. In this video, we’re going to talk about one of our brain’s limited resources: attention. Before we continue, I should mention that you’re definitely going to want to take the multitasking test that I uploaded recently, as we will be referring to the mind games that are in that video. While everything I say here will make some sense, if you don’t watch it, I can guarantee that it’ll be a much better experience if you do. Now, if you watched that video, you probably had many difficulties with the counting and focusing exercises that I presented. Some of you may have even been frustrated at how impossible they seem to be. Well, spoiler alert, they were meant to be nearly impossible to do and it’s because of our brain’s limited cognitive ability with attention-intensive tasks.

Before we go into further detail about these tasks, I think it’s important that we discuss the psychology of attention as a whole. Now, there are a lot of studies and theories surrounding attention and cognitive science, so we are only going to touch on a few at a high level: selective attention, inattentional blindness, and change blindness.

Selective attention is when our brain focuses on one thing while filtering out everything else. Attention is a limited resource. We only have so much. Therefore, we need a strategy to help us guide our attention to the important things while ignoring the unimportant things. If we didn’t have this, then we’d be equally focusing on everything, which ironically would make us focus on nothing. For example, right now you’re watching this video and I bet you have paid no attention to where your feet are placed or the color of the walls in your room. They’re not important to the task you are currently performing, which is watching this video, so your brain ignores them.

There are two main models surrounding selective visual attention that help explain how we see: the spotlight model and the zoom lens model. The spotlight model theorizes that our vision is like a spotlight with a focal point, an area surrounding the focal point called the fringe, and an area outside the fringe called the margin. The focal point is where everything is 100% in focus. The fringe is where we see things, but not as clearly, and the margin is where we don’t really see anything. The zoom lens model adds an element to the spotlight model by also suggesting that we can increase the size of the focal point at the detriment of how well we process the information.

For example, let’s say I’m looking at this sign in the park. My focal point is the sign, my fringe consists of the flowers surrounding the sign, and my margin consists of the other people walking around the park. Now I’m reasonably focused on the sign so I can read what it says. But as I increase what I’m focusing on to include the flowers and then maybe the people, I kind of focus on everything and nothing at the same time. The emphasis is no longer the sign and what it says, but more so that there is a sign in the park with flowers and people. Therefore, I can’t read the sign when my focus is like this. Your brain is like a computer. If you give it one tiny task to focus on, it will do it fast and efficiently. But as you start to give it more and more stuff to process, it will get slower. In the case of your brain, it might also make mistakes. This also works with how we hear things too. Have you ever noticed when you’re at a party, despite everyone talking around you, you’re able to focus on the conversation and the words of the people right in front of you? It’s kind of amazing that you can filter out all that noise to just focus on one particular sound coming from one particular place. This effect is known as the cocktail party effect and was studied by Colin Cherry. He did an experiment where he played two audio clips in each of his participants’ ears and asked them to focus on one of the clips. What he found was that his participants were able to describe the clip that they paid attention to, but not the one they didn’t pay attention to. Their brain tuned it out. This brings me to inattentional and change blindness.

Inattentional blindness and change blindness can be thought of as by-products of selective attention. Essentially, inattentional blindness is when you don’t notice something because you’re focused on something else. Change blindness is similar and is when something in the environment changes and you don’t notice it because your focus is elsewhere. One of the most famous experiments involving inattentional blindness is Chabris and Simons’s invisible gorilla test. The researchers asked participants to watch a video of people passing a basketball around and to count the number of passes they had between them. However, there was a catch during the video. A person in a gorilla costume would cross the screen. What they found was kind of shocking. They found that despite the obvious gorilla in the video, roughly 50% of participants did not notice anything out of the ordinary. They were focused on the ball passing and not the gorilla. Therefore, they were blind to the gorilla. Now, while we’ve been talking for the past few minutes, a couple of things have been changing in my background. The picture frame has changed colors, and the tree outside grew some apples. But why would you notice that? You’re focusing on me and what I was saying. You didn’t notice that you were falling victim to change blindness. And to be honest, it didn’t really matter. Your brain focused on what was important.

Okay, now that we’ve covered the science, let’s get back to my multitasking test. In the first part, I asked you to count the red Xs and blue Os that were on the screen. I think we can see where this is going. Your brain can’t do both at the same time so it kept switching between one and the other because both tasks are important. This led to slower processing and almost guaranteed mistakes. In addition to that, I threw in a green square in there just to see if you would notice. With your brain focused on red Xs and blue Os, there’s a good chance you didn’t or mistook it for a red X or blue O. Your brain wasn’t ready to process that, which may have led to inattentional blindness. In the second part, I asked you to listen to two different audio clips playing in each of your ears. Same concept applies here. Your brain could only focus on one at a time, making this test nearly impossible on the first try. It was like you were at a cocktail party trying to listen to multiple conversations at once, so your brain probably focused on one or the other.

I always like to leave my videos with a takeaway. Why is this important? Is it just because I like making psychological games that are impossible to do? Yeah, I like to do that. But there’s a greater point here. Too often in our world, we try to multitask when we can. Sometimes it’s harmless, like maybe when we’re doing schoolwork at home, and we have our favorite TV show on in the background. We don’t have to be focused on the TV show all the time. And our homework is not a critical task if not being paid attention to. However, there are some tasks that are important to pay attention to, like driving. Humans tend to overestimate how much they can focus on at one time. And if we learned anything from this video it’s that you effectively can’t multitask. So while it may seem okay to check your phone or plug in an address on your GPS while you’re driving, just remember that at best you can only switch your focus between two tasks. And if that focus is shifted and you’re blind to a deer on the road, that could be dangerous. Multitasking is a skill best left for games and tricks. We’re all bound to these cognitive functions and limitations, but the more we understand them, the better we can live with them. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time.