Attention, Joint Attention, and Social Cognition

ABSTRACT— Before social cognition there is joint processing of information about the attention of self and others. This joint attention requires the integrated activation of a distributed cortical network involving the anterior and posterior attention systems. In infancy, practice with the integrated activation of this distributed attention network is a major contributor to the development of social cognition. Thus, the functional neuroanatomies of social cognition and the anterior–posterior attention systems have much in common. These propositions have implications for understanding joint attention, social cognition, and autism.     

What Produces Television Attention and Attention Style?

Individual looks at television vary enormously in length, and this has previously indicated differences in ongoing cognitive processes. Furthermore, the relative frequency of looks of different lengths may indicate styles of attention to television. This article compares visual attention of 152 subjects across a variety of genres and examines differences located by situation, person, and media perception variables. Attention style was not consistent for individuals but varied for different types of programming and between‐program breaks. Situational, person, and media belief variables did not predict the proportions of four types of looks. They did, however, predict differences in the proportion of moderately short (orienting) looks across types of content, but not the previously more important very short (monitoring) or moderately long (engaged) looks. The overall importance of type of content in these results suggests that further research should examine within‐program differences in message construction and assess attentional style as patterns or sequences of looks.     

Attention genes

A major problem for developmental science is understanding how the cognitive and emotional networks important in carrying out mental processes can be related to individual differences. The last five years have seen major advances in establishing links between alleles of specific genes and the neural networks underlying aspects of attention. These findings have the potential of illuminating important aspects of normal development and its pathologies. We need to learn how genes and experience combine to influence the structure of neural networks and the efficiency with which they are exercised. Methods for addressing these issues are central to progress in the decade ahead.     

对注意的再思考:一个注意的强化学习模型

本文在分析总结现有注意理论的基础上,假设注意是一种信息选择现象,而非心理结构或资源。通过借鉴人工智能领域强化学习算法的思想,笔者提出了一种可以表现出注意现象的人类强化学习模型。该模型描述了人与环境交互的过程:人接受环境的反馈,根据自身心理状态调整行为策略,以最大化所获收益。该过程中,注意体现为高价值信息逐渐获得优先加工的现象。因此,本文对注意的本质进行了重新思考,为未来注意研究提供了新思路。     

Attention and cognition

Forty 4-year-old children were subjects in an experimental designed to determine whether learning to attend to relevant cues is a sufficient condition for acquisition of length and number conservation. Three groups of non-conservers were trained by means of an oddity-problem procedure to attend to the cues specifying either length, number, or both length and number. They were subsequently tested along with an untrained control group on tasks of length, number, mass and continuous quantity conservation. Some improvement in conservation was found, but it was neither impressive in magnitude nor specific to the cues of training. For example, the group trained to attend to length cues conserved length about 25% of the time, the same rate at which this group also conserved number, mass, and liquid quantity. This non-specificity is contrary to an attention hypothesis and suggests instead that training, to the extent it was effective, induced a general, abstract quantitative knowledge.     

Attention in learning

Learners exhibit many apparently irrational behaviors in their use of cues, sometimes learning to ignore relevant cues or to attend to irrelevant ones. A learning phenomenon called highlighting seems especially to demand explanation in terms of learned attention. Highlighting complements the classic phenomenon of conditioned blocking, which has been shown to involve learned inattention. Highlighting and blocking, along with a wide spectrum of other perplexing learning phenomena, can be accounted for by recent connectionist models in which both attentional shifting and associative learning are driven by the rational goal of rapid error reduction.     

注意分配与注意选择能力的年龄差异比较

为了考察注意能力的年龄差异,分别从注意分配能力和注意选择能力两个方面对青年和老年被试的表现进行了比较。结果表明：青、老年在注意分配能力上没有显着的差异;而青、老年在注意选择能力上却有显着的差异,老年的注意选择能力有显着的衰退。因此,注意能力衰退对认知年老化的影响可能更主要的是来自于注意控制能力的衰退。     

Attention Metaphors: How Metaphors Guide the Cognitive Psychology of Attention

The concept of attention is defined by multiple inconsistent metaphors that scientists use to identify relevant phenomena, frame hypotheses, construct experiments, and interpret data. (1) The Filter metaphor shapes debates about partial vs. complete filtering, early vs. late selection, and information filtering vs. enhancement. (2) The Spotlight metaphor raises the issue of space- vs. object-based selection, and it guides research on the size, shape, and movement of the attentional focus. (3) The Spotlight-in-the-Brain metaphor is frequently used to interpret imaging studies of attention. (4) The debate between supramodal and pre-motor theories of attention replays the dichotomy between the Spotlight and the Vision metaphors of attention. Our analysis reveals the central role of metaphor in scientific theory and research on attention, exposes hidden assumptions behind various research strategies, and shows the need for flexibility in the use of current metaphors.     

Attention to pure tones

Listeners were required to detect increments of intensity or frequency in trains of pure tone bursts under different conditions of attention. The data were analysed taking into account contralateral events when more than one stimulus train was present. Marked changes in d' and β were found and the changes were positively correlated.

If targets are rare and attention is divided the values of β and d' are the same as in undivided attention provided that the contralateral event is a correct rejection, but fall if the contralateral events are hits or false alarms. If targets and non-targets are equi-probable no such difference is found. The data suggest that the observers can make use of the statistical properties of the stimulus sources. The results are compared with those in recent experiments using pure tones in a discrete trial paradigm and in experiments using semantic stimuli.     

Attention capture by faces

We report three experiments that investigate whether faces are capable of capturing attention when in competition with other non-face objects. In Experiment 1a participants took longer to decide that an array of objects contained a butterfly target when a face appeared as one of the distracting items than when the face did not appear in the array. This irrelevant face effect was eliminated when the items in the arrays were inverted in Experiment 1b ruling out an explanation based on some low-level image-based properties of the faces. Experiment 2 replicated and extended the results of Experiment 1a. Irrelevant faces once again interfered with search for butterflies but, when the roles of faces and butterflies were reversed, irrelevant butterflies no longer interfered with search for faces. This suggests that the irrelevant face effect is unlikely to have been caused by the relative novelty of the faces or arises because butterflies and faces were the only animate items in the arrays. We conclude that these experiments offer evidence of a stimulus-driven capture of attention by faces.     

Attention attenuates metacontrast masking

The influence of attention on perceptual awareness was examined using metacontrast masking. Attention was manipulated with endogenous cues to assess the effects on the temporal and spatial parameters of target visibility. Experiment 1 examined the time course of effective masking when the target and mask set were presented at an attended vs. an unattended location. The valid allocation of attention decreased the magnitude of the masking effect (i.e. increased visibility) for approximately 80 ms. Furthermore, even with spatial displacements of the target and mask and center-to-center separations of 1.5 degrees or 2.7 degrees of visual angle (Experiment 2), target visibility was increased when attention was validly allocated. These results indicate that attention influences low-level visual processes to enhance visual awareness.     

选择性注意和分配性注意对多感觉整合的不同影响*

以简单图形为视觉刺激,以短纯音作为听觉刺激,通过指导被试注意不同通道（注意视觉、注意听觉、注意视听）以形成不同注意状态（选择性注意和分配性注意）,考察了注意对多感觉整合的影响,发现只有在分配性注意时被试对双通道目标的反应最快最准确。通过竞争模型分析发现,这种对双通道目标的加工优势源自于视听双通道刺激的整合。上述结果表明,只有在分配性注意状态下才会产生多感觉整合。     

The Development of Selective Attention in Children With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

The influence of age on a selective attention task was studied in a sample of children with and without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The impact of methylphenidate (MPH) treatment on selective attention was also investigated in the children with ADHD. Two age groups of children with ADHD and two age groups of control children were tested using a timed computer task. The task consisted of identifying visual target stimuli under various distracter conditions. Distracters varied on the basis of modality (i.e., visual, auditory, or both) and task relevance (i.e., meaningful or irrelevant). Reaction times and accuracy were measured. Children with ADHD were less efficient on the selective attention task than were children without ADHD, and older children were more efficient than younger children in both groups. Children without ADHD were influenced more by the nature of distracters than were children with ADHD. For children with ADHD, MPH improved performance overall.