Natural Selective Attention - Annotated Bibliography Example

Annotated Bibliography on Selective Attention Annotated Bibliography on Selective Attention Bradley, M. (2009). Natural selective attention: Orienting and emotion. Psychophysiology, 46(1), 1-11. In this ten-page study, Bradley examines the foundation of orienting and attention. She forms a hypothesis that certain defensive and appetitive motivations systems have evolved to protect and sustain the life of each individual human. In this article, she proposes various motivational activations that take place in order to create a reaction in humans that causes them to select an appropriate behavior. Some of the activators covered in this article are a detection of significance, which causes individual to choose how they will act. Bradley has collected data that explores the role of various stimuli and then presents those to the reader to suggest, “orienting is mediate by activation of fundamental motivational systems that have evolved to support survival” (Bradley, 2009, p. 1). The essence of this study examines human behavior and what motivates us to act. To accomplish this goal, the researcher has introduced and studied various stimuli to determine the motivating factors behind a person coming to an understanding of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ behavior. The study is quite scientific and involved, but will be a worthwhile inclusion in this student’s paper based on the reputation of the Margaret Bradley. She is a director at the Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention at the University of Florida. This is a certainly a reputable and scholarly source that is worthy of inclusion in future work on selective attention. Breeze, J., Kirkham, A., & Mari-Beffa, P. (2011). Evidence of reduced selective attention in schizotypal personality disorder. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 33(7), 776-784. This eight-page article is quite interesting as it examines selective attention from the perspective of people exhibiting schizotypal personality disorder. The authors begin from the understanding that current research shows that schizophrenic people tend to exhibit increased switching tasks. This is evident even though high-schizotypy participants seem to only present this pattern in incongruent trials. Given this information, the researchers writing this article sought to explore whether this fact results from difficulties in selective attention, or if it was an issue with task control. To accomplish their goal and to test the hypothesis, the researchers identified 18 participants that exhibited high levels of psychometrically defined schizotypy. They also located and enlisted the participation of 16 people who had low scores when tested in two different version of a task-switching paradigm. To conduct their study, participants needed to switch their attention between a color or a shape of different bidimensional objects. They did this following the various cues of the researchers. In the end, it was shown that high-schizotypy subject overwhelmingly showed a tendency to switch costs in incongruent trials under both version of the tasks. This, according to the authors, demonstrates that there is a, “deficit in the selection of the perceptual dimension instead of the selection of the selection of the response rules” (p. 776). Dittrich, K., & Stahl, Cristoph. (2012). Selective impairment of auditory selective attention under concurrent cognitive load. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38(3), 618-627. This article reports the findings of a detailed study of auditory selective attention conducted by two professors in Germany. They begin from the premise that impairment when a visual stimulus is introduced is selective. Special attention is placed on the notion that a person becomes distracted when such a stimulus is introduced. In this way, the cognitive load task does not equal the load required for a selective attention task. These two authors conducted four experiments that ended up demonstrating the selective load effects for auditory selective attention. They took two different cognitive load tasks on two different auditory tasks and examined them. The effects on selective load were examined. They found that interference in a nonverbal-auditory task ended up increasing when placed under a concurrent nonverbal-auditory cognitive load. It did not increase, however, under a concurrent verbal-auditory cognitive load. They also discovered that the opposite ended up being observed as interference in a verbal auditory task increased under a concurrent verbal-auditory cognitive load, but not under nonverbal-auditory cognitive load. This study is certainly worthwhile in the context of this research because it reports the findings of a recent experiment that was conducted under controlled conditions. Hubnew, R., Steinhauser, M., & Lehle, C. (2010). A duel-stage two-phase model of selective attention. Psychological Review, 117(3), 759-784. This particular was also conducted in Germany. The researchers looked at the dual-stage two-phase (DSTP) model. They used that as a basis to introduce a formal and general model of selective attention. This model included both an early stage of stimulus selection, and a late stage of stimulus selection. As reported in the article, the early stage information is selected largely by perceptual filters, which have a limited selectivity. In contrast, the late stage stimuli seem to be more efficient on a categorical basis. The researchers then make the point that selectivity is low at first, but then increase rapidly when various stimuli introduced into the environment begin to be processed. This study takes this information and applies the DSTP model to account for the distributional data of 3 flanker test experiments conducted by the researchers in Germany. In the end, the model fit the data exceptionally well when compared to those of alternative single-stage models with a continuously increasing selectivity. The case can then be made this the model presented in this article provides a detailed account of how both early and late stages of attention interact in the control of an individual’s performance. This is a critical component to understand when studying selective attention and is certainly a worthwhile study that must be considered in the context of this research project. Lamers, M., Roelofs, A., & Rabeling-Keus, I. (2010). Selective attention and response set in the Stroop task. Memory & Cognition, 38(7), 893-904. This eleven-page study looks at response set membership and how it contributes to the interference in a given color-word Stroop task. The authors begin from the viewpoint that this action may be the result of, “selective allocation of attention to eligible response or, alternatively, to greater inhibition of distracters that are not responses” (2010, p. 893). This article is designed to report on two experiments that these researchers recently conducted regarding this issue. The first experiment had membership being manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis. They did this by cuing the possible responses for each trial. The response time in this experiment ended up being longer for distractors that corresponded to a cued, eligible response as opposed to an ineligible one. The researchers made certain that the cuing effect was independent of the number of different responses. The second experiment had the distractor being cued on half the trials. When this occurred, the response time was decreased on both incongruent and congruent trials. Both experiments ended up demonstrating that the effects were constant throughout the entire response time distributions. The authors of this study use that data to propose that the response set effects do come about because of the selective allocation of attention to eligible responses. Meiran, N., Dimov, E., & Ganel, T. (2013). Selective attention to perceptual dimensions between dimensions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 39(1), 191-201 The authors in this article begin by reviewing recent experiments designed to address the question of whether switching attention between perceptual dimension and selective attention to dimensions are actually complete over a common resource. They note that selection failure is actually indicated by a poor performance evident in the filtering condition when compare to the baseline. They discovered that most people can actually ignore an irrelevant dimension that they are observing, such as shape, when they are focused on another attention, such as color. In summary, people can also, at will, alter their attention from one dimension to another. This particular study, then, looks at how these two different abilities relate to one another. To put it another way, they wanted to determine if attention switching could potentially compromise the ability to, in the end, ignore pertinent and relevant information. In order to do this, they look at recent studies that have been conducted in an effort to answer their questions and hypotheses. Piai, V., Roelofs, A., & Schriefers, H. (2012). Distractor strength and selective attention in picture-naming performance. Memory & Cognition, 40(4), 614-627. One key aspect of selective attention is to study visual stimuli that are introduced to people on an everyday basis. In this 13-page study, the authors specifically look at distractors and their eventual effect on a human’s ability to associate pictures and words. They start from the premise that humans have the capacity to select words in verbal language based on mental pictures that they have stored in their memory. It was accepted long ago that competition played a key role in this reality. Recently, however, these views have changed and researchers believe this ability to recognize words and images is a result of lexical selection, rather than competition. This study looks at lexical selection and role that various mechanisms play in word association. This article looks briefly at both of these viewpoints. They then argue in favor of the competitive view, but propose an alternative to recent published studies. In this vein, this article is quite valuable because it examines two opposing theories on distractor strength, while proposing a balanced approach adopting both views. By understanding the studies that have been published, one can begin to better determine how selective attention plays a key role in how we associate words and images in our mind. Schoenherr, J. (2010). Selective attention and subjective confidence calibration. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 72(2), 353-368. This was a recent study conducted to determine if anything has changed since the failed experiments of Eriksen and Eriksen in 1974 that dealt with selective visual attention. They discovered, in the end, that participants in their study were often unaware of the selective attention failures that they demonstrated. This ends up supporting the idea that certain decisional processing comes about largely based on the identities of incongruent flankers. The interesting fact of this study lies in the fact that most participants were confident that their responses were, in fact, accurate, while the findings indicated otherwise. Response time amongst participants ended up being slower and more accurate when confidence was required, as opposed to when it was not. This shows that confidence reports can, in fact, affect the ability of a person to process information. Evidence in this study also revealed that the contextual flanking of information can potentially slow response time, and this suggest that such information can contribute the eventual decisions that people make. Conclusion In essence, selective attention deals with cognitive psychology. It involves how we think and how we react. The two commonly dealt areas in this discipline involve auditory and visual stimuli and how each individual person interprets them. The articles presented in this annotated bibliography encompass both of these areas and contain a thorough mix of actual experiments and literature based research that has been studied to test various hypotheses and arrive at new conclusions that help us to better understand selective attention. All of the articles presented here are from scholarly sources, which make them viable sources of information. Once article dealt with selective attention and its function in helping humans determine what is considered right or wrong behavior. Social scientists, and in particular psychologists, have long since sought to determine what causes a person to act against the social order. In some cases, a person may hear something that makes them act in a way contrary to the social norm. In other instances, they may see something that sparks a repressed memory, causing them to temporarily lose control, which can result in anti-social behavior. Whatever the case may be, this study is relevant to us because we must understand the conditions under which humans will begin to acct in contradiction to what that they are taught to understand as the difference between good and evil. A further area of interest when considering selective attention lies in word association. Many times individuals can recall a word simply based on the image in their mind. Psychologists are now studying this effect and how individuals can use that recall to act out in certain ways. The study of schizophrenics is particularly revealing as it can help us better understand the selective recall of people who may be psychologically disturbed. In this way, we can use selective attention to better understand the thought process of certain individuals when a particular auditory or visual stimulus is introduced. Since selective attention deals with the notion that humans tend to gravitate their actions solely towards one visual or auditory stimulus at a time, it is important to understand why we tend to neglect other important aspects of the environment around us at the same time. The studies presented in this annotated bibliography begin to do just that. Some psychologists would content that such selective attention is largely dictated by a human’s level or arousal. If this is the case, then we need to work to determine the stimuli that, when introduced, would cause a person to neglect all that they know to be true and right, and end up acting in a way that goes against their values and ethics. That makes this particular area of study relevant to this student and is the purpose behind this research. Finally, it must be noted that is a plethora of research already conducted regarding the area of selective attention. It is obviously important that future psychologists work to continue to uncover the mystery surrounding behavior and the ways that we end up acting the way that we do. Many of these experiments are quite involved and detailed, but they are all designed with the same end goal in mind. That goal is to push humans towards better understanding how their actions impact others around them, in addition to determining how to reprogram an individuals thoughts process such that selective attention will focus them back on making right and proper choices. Read More