Attention
William James (1890) wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.
Such exploration is both ancient and continually relevant, as it can have effects in fields ranging from mental health and the study of disorders of consciousness to artificial intelligence and its domains of research.
Psychologist John B. Watson calls Juan Luis Vives the father of modern psychology because, in his book De Anima et Vita (The Soul and Life), he was the first to recognize the importance of empirical investigation.
With the development of these technological innovations, neuroscientists became interested in this type of research that combines sophisticated experimental paradigms from cognitive psychology with these new brain imaging techniques.
[11] Wundt interpreted the experimental outcome introducing the meaning of attention as "that psychical process, which is operative in the clear perception of the narrow region of the content of consciousness.
In the second stage, attention is concentrated to a specific area of the visual scene (i.e., it is focused), and processing is performed in a serial fashion.
This size-change mechanism was inspired by the zoom lens one might find on a camera, and any change in size can be described by a trade-off in the efficiency of processing.
Duncan and Humphrey's AET understanding of attention maintained that "there is an initial pre-attentive parallel phase of perceptual segmentation and analysis that encompasses all of the visual items present in a scene.
"[28]: 8 In the twentieth century, the pioneering research of Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria led to the three-part model of neuropsychology defining the working brain as being represented by three co-active processes listed as Attention, Memory, and Activation.
The two books together are considered by Homskaya's account as "among Luria's major works in neuropsychology, most fully reflecting all the aspects (theoretical, clinical, experimental) of this new discipline.
"[32] The product of the combined research of Vygotsky and Luria have determined a large part of the contemporary understanding and definition of attention as it is understood at the start of the 21st-century.
Generally, classical research into attention investigated the ability of people to learn new information when there were multiple tasks to be performed, or to probe the limits of our perception (c.f.
For example, if traffic intensifies, a passenger may stop talking to allow the driver to navigate the increasingly difficult roadway; a conversation partner over a phone would not be aware of the change in environment.
One, conceived by cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman,[44] explains that there is a single pool of attentional resources that can be freely divided among multiple tasks.
Indigenous heritage toddlers and caregivers in San Pedro were observed to frequently coordinate their activities with other members of a group in ways parallel to a model of simultaneous attention, whereas middle-class European-descent families in the U.S. would move back and forth between events.
However, comparing these two processes is challenging because external signals do not operate completely exogenously, but will only summon attention and eye movements if they are important to the subject.
[68] More recent experimental evidence[69][70][71] support the idea that the primary visual cortex creates a bottom-up saliency map,[72][4] which is received by the superior colliculus in the midbrain area to guide attention or gaze shifts.
This relies on the reflexive response due to "overlearning" the skill of morse code reception/detection/transcription so that it is an autonomous function requiring no specific attention to perform.
This overtraining of the brain comes as the "practice of a skill [surpasses] 100% accuracy," allowing the activity to become autonomic, while your mind has room to process other actions simultaneously.
Only a concentrated amount of attention on how effective one is completing the task and how long they take is being analyzed making a more redundant analysis on overall cognition of being able to process multiple stimuli through perception.
In a 2007 review, Professor Eric Knudsen[86] describes a more general model which identifies four core processes of attention, with working memory at the center: Neurally, at different hierarchical levels spatial maps can enhance or inhibit activity in sensory areas, and induce orienting behaviors like eye movement.
[99] In 1955, Jules Henry suggested that there are societal differences in sensitivity to signals from many ongoing sources that call for the awareness of several levels of attention simultaneously.
There are several studies to support that the use of keen attention towards learning is much more common in Indigenous Communities of North and Central America than in a middle-class European-American setting.
San Pedro toddlers and caregivers frequently coordinated their activities with other members of a group in multiway engagements rather than in a dyadic fashion.
[106] The Neural Abstraction Pyramid[107] is a hierarchical recurrent convolutional model, which incorporates bottom-up and top-down flow of information to iteratively interpret images.
[110] New technology has yielded more information, such that there is a large, distributed network of frontal, parietal, temporal, and subcortical brain areas that have been tied to neglect.
Franciscus Donders used mental chronometry to study attention and it was considered a major field of intellectual inquiry by authors such as Sigmund Freud.
It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.
In the 1950s, research psychologists renewed their interest in attention when the dominant epistemology shifted from positivism (i.e., behaviorism) to realism during what has come to be known as the "cognitive revolution".
Broadbent's Filter Model of Attention states that information is held in a pre-attentive temporary store, and only sensory events that have some physical feature in common are selected to pass into the limited capacity processing system.
