Directing Attention

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Attention
you drained (McNay, McCarty, & Gold, 2001). When you are already tired, focusing
attention on anything becomes more difficult. Third, attention is limited. When your
attention is focused on reading this book, for instance, you will have less attention left
over to listen to a conversation in the next room.
Directing Attention
doing
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To experience the process of attention, try “moving it around” a bit. When
learn you finish reading this sentence, look at something behind you, then face
by
forward and notice the next sound you hear, then visualize your best friend,
then focus on how your tongue feels. You just used attention to direct your perceptual
systems toward different aspects of your external and internal environments. When you
looked behind you, shifting attention involved overt orienting—pointing sensory systems at a particular stimulus. But you were able to shift attention to an image of your
friend’s face without having to move a muscle. This is called covert orienting. (We have
heard a rumor that students sometimes use covert orienting to shift their attention from
their lecturer to thoughts that have nothing to do with the lecture.)
How do you control, or allocate, your attention? Research shows that control over
attention can be voluntary or involuntary (Yantis, 1993). Voluntary, or goal-directed,
control over attention occurs when you purposely focus so that you can perform a task.
Voluntary control reflects top-down processing, because attention is guided by knowledgebased factors such as intention, beliefs, expectations, and motivation. As people learn
certain skills, they voluntarily direct their attention to information they once ignored.
For example, the experienced driver notices events taking place farther down the road
than the first-time driver does.
When some aspect of the environment—such as a loud noise—diverts your attention, control is said to be involuntary, or stimulus driven. Stimulus characteristics that
tend to capture attention include abrupt changes in lighting or color (such as flashing
signs), movement, and the appearance of unusual shapes (Folk, Remington, & Wright,
1994). Engineering psychologists’ research on which stimuli are most likely to attract—
and distract—attention has been used in the design of everything from Internet web
sites and billboard ads to operator warning devices for airliners, nuclear power plants,
and other complex systems (Clay, 2000; Laughery, 1999). Other psychologists use the
results of attention research to help design advertisements, logos, and product packaging that “grab” potential customers’ attention.
As already mentioned, attending to some stimuli makes us less able to attend to others. In other words, attention is selective. It is like a spotlight that can illuminate only
a part of the external or internal environment at any particular moment. So if you focus
intently on your reading or on a computer game, you may fail to perceive even dramatic changes in other parts of your environment. This phenomenon has been called
inattentional blindness (Mack & Rock, 1998; Mack, 2003). In one study, a researcher
asked college students for directions to a campus building (Simons & Ambinder, 2005).
During each conversation, two “workmen” carrying a large door passed between the
researcher and the student. As the door hid the researcher from the student’s view, one
of the “workmen” took his place. This new person then resumed the conversation with
the student as though nothing had happened. Amazingly, only half of the students
noticed that they were suddenly talking to a new person! The rest had apparently been
paying so much attention to the researcher’s question, or to the map he was showing,
that they did not notice what he looked like. Magicians take advantage of inattentional
blindness when they use sudden movements or other attention-grabbing stimuli to
draw our attention away from the actions that lie behind their tricks.
Your search for Barney’s Diner will be helped by your ability to overtly allocate attention to a certain part of the environment. It would be made even easier if Barney’s had
the only flashing sign on the road. As the most intense stimulus around you, it would
attract your attention automatically. Psychologists describe this ability to search for targets rapidly and automatically as parallel processing. It is as if you can examine all nearby
locations at once (in parallel) and rapidly detect the target no matter where it appears.