Welcome To Your Brain
Pay Attention!Seminar 3
Goals for This Seminar What can learning about attention teach
us about how we learn?
How can we connect our learning about attention to our
experiences to gain a better understanding of ourselves as
learners?
Based on our understanding of attention and ourselves as
learners, what strategies can we adopt to help us with the process
of learning?
THINK-PUZZLE-EXPLOREWhat do you think you know about focus and
attention?
What questions or puzzles do you have?
What does the topic make you want to explore?
3AttentionWhat we choose to attend to and what we choose to
ignore defines our subjective experience of the world William
James
AttentionAttention is concerned with resources and their
limitations. At any given time, people have a certain amount of
mental energy to devote to all the possible tasks and all the
incoming information.
If we devote portion of resources to one task, less is available
to others.
The more complex and unfamiliar the task, the more mental
resources must be allocated to that task.5Selective and Divided
AttentionSelective attention: we choose to attend to some stimuli
and ignore others. The concentrated focus of attention on
particular stimuli saves our attentional energy.
Divided attention: we allocate our available attentional
resources to coordinate performances on more than one task at a
timeMovie Time Professor Daniel Simons Experiment
You will see two teams of basketball players. One wearing white
shirts and one wearing black shirts. Count the total number of time
the white team passes the ball.
Then, I will ask you the result and we will see how many people
are right.
Selective Attention
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo 8Change Blindnesss
paradigmhttp://www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download/index.html
Flicker ParadigmSequence is repeated 60s or until participant
detects change
What's the Difference between Looking and Seeing?A large
fraction of traffic accidents are of the type "driver looked but
failed to see". Here, drivers collide with pedestrians in plain
view, with cars directly in front of them (the classic
"rear-ender"), and even run into trains. (That's right -- run into
trains, not the other way around.) In such cases, information from
the world is entering the driver's eyes. But at some point along
the way this information is lost, causing the driver to lose
connection with reality. They are looking but they are not seeing.
What's going on? Our findings indicate that the critical factor is
attention: To see an object change, it is necessary to attend to
it. To show this, we developed a flicker paradigm in which an
original and a modified image continually alternate, one after the
other, with a brief blank field between the two (see Figure 1
below). The onset of each blank field swamps the local motion
signals caused by a change, short-circuiting the automatic system
that normally draws attention to its location. Without automatic
control, attention is controlled entirely by slower, higher-level
mechanisms which search the scene, object by object, until
attention lands upon the object that is changing. The change
blindness induced under these conditions is a form of invisibility:
it can become very difficult to see a change that is obvious once
attended.
9Divided Attention We often manage to engage in more than one
task at a time and we shift our attentional resources to allocate
then as needed.
Example: experienced drivers easily can talk while driving under
most circumstances, but they can quickly shift all their attention
from talking and toward driving
Question: how difficult is it to do 2 or more tasks at once ?
=> Dual-task performanceDivided attention while driving: a
dangerous dual taskA dual task performance in the real world.
Using cell phones while driving is believed to be a major cause
in 50% of highway accidents.
The argument is: talking on a cell phone distracts the drivers
attention from navigating the vehicle on the roadMultitaskingThe
brain cannot multitask:
Studies have shown that a person who is interrupted takes 50%
longer to complete a task and makes up 50% more errors.
What Makes You Say That?Emotions get our attention: used in
advertising.
Whats going on in these adverts?
What do you see that makes you say that?
Movie Timehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRf9Spt5toI
14
Movie Timehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40DykbPa4Lc
15Gist versus DetailMeaning before detail: Emotional arousal
focuses attention on the gist of an experience at the expense of
peripheral details.Which word was not part of the list?
SleepRedYawn
Read out words: Slumber, pillow, yawn, tired, duvet, dream, nap,
snooze.16The Brain Needs a BreakThe most common mistake in
communication: relay too much information, with not enough time to
connect the dots!
Can you think of an example of that?Reaction TimesOne way to
measure attention is to use reaction times!
STROOP TESTS
Stroop EffectStroop Spy Test
What causes the STROOP effect?
Response competitionOverlearned name that word reading response
competes with unfamiliar name that colour task.
20Attention and Visual SearchFinding your best friend at a
concert is hard
Yet you can spot the green scarf in this crowd
The Brain is a novelty seekerThe brain has a persistent interest
in novelty.
An environment that contains mostly predictable stimuli lowers
the brains interest
Using Novelty in LearningHumor
Movement get the blood flowing
Multi-sensory interesting colorful visuals - & talk about
learning
Quiz Games help you rehearse add repetitions for long term
memory
Music Learning and AttentionShort study sessions, each segment
on a single core concept GIST
Big picture first, detail to be filled in later 40% improvement
in understanding!
Plan of study, highlighting links between items
We Dont Pay Attention to Boring ThingsThe brains attentional
spotlight can focus on only one thing at a time: no multitasking!We
are better at seeing patterns and the gist of an event than at
recording detail.Emotional arousal helps the brain learn.Use
narratives and create emotional events to hold others and your own
attention!The End
