Foreign Perspectives

Chapter 6, on Perception and attention runs to about 50 pages and starts the second volume of the first book. This is the third of the part 2 exam chapters but TMA3 also uses the background theory provided here.

This chapter starts starts by considering how the bottom-up information coming from our senses (i.e. sensations) direct our attention and then follows on to look at how these are perceived as top-down information in our brain. Thus the pattern of light and dark remained the same yet our perception of it changed this into the cow that we perceived later when the additional cues were added. How we perceive a journey is both in general terms (semantic memory) and the instance of a particular journey (episodic memory) hence we may know what usually happens on the way to work yet may not recall the specific details of the journey today.

Attention is the process by which we allocate cognitive processing resources. We tend not to notice everything (e.g. the change in the person asking directions) and Kahneman (1973) suggests that we have a limited-capacity central processor i.e. that we have a limited capacity attention. However, there appear to be more specialised processing units around as Navon and Gopher (1979) found in their multiple-resources theory of attention. Whatever their number, Posner (1980) recognised that there is still a limited capacity and therefore our attention is directed in the manner of an attentional spotlight which acts to reduce the amount of processing undertaken (albeit this selective attention means that we ignore things outside the spotlight). This spotlight acts in the form of attentional tunnelling when there’s too much to consider and we are forced to ignore things or stimulus-induced shifts of attention (e.g. a loud bang). Broadbent (1954) suggested a bottleneck theory of attention that reduced the amount of information early on thus allowing for the limited processing power, the snag with this being that it doesn’t allow for contextual processing at higher levels of perception and in practice it appears that where the filtering is applied varies depending on the processing load. This all presupposes that everything is conscious i.e. that they are controlled processes but there are also automatic processes which avoid the issues around the limited processing capacity but at the expense of losing the detail. The Stroop test is one example of this and hence people find it difficult to read the colour when the word printed is at odds with the colour that it is printed in.

As with attention, there are a number of different theories of perception. The chapter first looks at Gregory’s (1966) constructivist theory of perception which considers that as we don’t use all of the sensory information to begin with, we are therefore assembling our perception from incomplete information and in doing so we construct hypotheses that are subsequently proven or disproven as more information arrives. This explains a number of optical illusions and the way that those in different cultures perceive these but it is not a complete explanation. Gibson’s (1950) idea of direct perception considers that everything is already there in the sensory information and that we perceive the world as a whole and moreover that we perceive it dynamically rather than as a series of static images (e.g. most visual illusions only work as static images); no hypotheses are required.

Phenomenological experience considers the whole area of perception to be a fusion of our prior experience, our current understanding and the context and tries to understand not only how we perceive things but what the experience of perception is like (e.g. a cube is a building block to a child but a dice to a gambler). Images are considered as consisting of a figure and ground (the background). Gestalt  psychology considers the identification of whole objects and challenges the idea of an attentional  spotlight.

In the real world there’s a lot of research in, for example, traffic collisions considering such things as the sensory conspicuity (will it flash out at you) and attention conspicuity (will you actually notice it).

For the exam, the key topics for this chapter are:

Attentional spotlight
Bottleneck theories of attention
Topdown processing
Limited capacity attention

As usual with the final day there was lot of packing going on before breakfast.

The first task was to organise a group presentation of our results which went surprisingly well as indeed did the ur presentation to three other groups. Breaking the presentations into smaller units made for a much more satisfying pace to the morning.

The final presentation by the tutors was a mix of the serious and the comical. It was a little sad too as this was the final presentation of the module after what has been decades for some of the he tutors.

After that it was time for farewells before we went our separate ways. In my case it’s a very long drawn out trip that’ll take getting on for ten hours due mainly to a lot of sitting around between legs of the journey.

The final working day was a rather busy and stressful one. We spent the first hour assembling a list of newspaper articles for our thematic analysis but also had to “volunteer” an hour each to be participants in the experiments other groups were conducting (seemingly mainly on variations of memory).

With overlapping volunteering, our momentum was lost to an extent and it seemed to take quite long to get our first order coding done (although it was based on nearly 60 pages of articles) and we didn’t really get into 2nd order coding until well after lunch with sorting themes out running into the evening.

In the midst of that we had the tutorial on the report that we’ve to write for the course.

The schizophrenic lecture was fascinating and the only downside is that we only had the abbreviated version (it used to run well over two hours) but we have a video on it to look forward to later.

Finally there was the final performance of the DXR222 panto as, sadly, it’s “RIP DXR222 2002-2015”.

The morning starts off with the preparation of the second more complete project proposal which takes a surprising amount of time. That has to be handed in around 11am after which there’s a wait for an hour or so while the tutors evaluate each proposal. In our case, they’d picked up a couple of inconsistencies and wanted a couple more research papers to back it up. That set us off looking for the papers which used up the afternoon.

The evening saw a choice of two optional lectures which unfortunately were in two quite closely related areas.

Having finished the preparatory steps, the project work began this morning.

From 9am to 10am was allocated to forming the groups and choosing topics. The only organisation imposed was that there was one room allocated for the people interested in a communications project and another for those interested in memory so it was a little chaotic to begin with but settled down surprisingly quickly and in 15 minutes or so most project groups had been formed.

That notionally left an hour to work up the initial project proposal though several groups needed an extension on that for one reason or another (e.g. our original idea was vetoed on ethical grounds and required a few adjustments to the approach). After that, we’d a break for an hour to let the tutors sort out which groups they were looking after before a brief meeting with them and then we were off for the day.

I figured that I couldn’t leave Bath without seeing the Roman baths so it was off to town for me. Upfront the £14.50 seems a bit expensive but it’s actually quite good value given the sheer scale of the place and considering that both an audio guide and a tour led by a very knowledgeable and engaging guide is included. It takes around two hours to work your way around.