It's a Jungle in There: How Competition and Cooperation in the Brain Shape the Mind by David A. Rosenbaum Page B
Authors: David A. Rosenbaum
perception to serve action. 13
By this way of thinking, you don’t have to see attention as something mysterious. Attention exists, according to the view suggested here, because there are factions in the nervous system whose fates ultimately depend on the actions carried out.
An implication of this view is that any attentional bottlenecks that might exist in the nervous system should exist at the action side. A cognitive psychologist at the University of California (San Diego), Harold Pashler, has argued for this position. 14 He has described experiments that fit with the action-selection (or response-selection) hypothesis. Instructions to subjects in his experiments go something like this.
1. If a light appears on the left, press a button with your left hand.
2. If a light appears on the right, press a button with your right hand.
3. If a tone sounds, press a foot pedal.
4. Carry out each action as quickly and as accurately as possible.
In the actual experiment, the tone (for the foot) is often presented very soon after one of the lights comes on (either for the left hand or right). In conditions of special interest, the tone may come on so soon after the light appears that it actually comes on before the hand response is made. The interesting result is that the second (foot) response is delayed by an especially long time in this circumstance, as if the second (foot) response cannot be selected until the first (hand) response has been.
There is no
a priori
reason why this should be. A foot and a hand can move together, as is obvious from watching a drummer pound a bass drum with her foot while she taps a cymbal with her hand. Her hands and feet can move at the same time.
According to Pashler, the reason for the delayed foot response in the light-then-tone experiment is that the foot response can’t be selected until the hand response has been. If one response is selected first, the second selection must wait its turn. 15
Looking Behavior
One way you can see attention playing out in action selection is in people’s looking behavior. It’s not uncommon to see heads turning synchronously when a bunch of oglers notices an attractive passerby. Outside of group settings, eye movements of individuals acting alone provide a window to attentional states. By recording where individuals look, researchers have studied what captures people’s attention and, therefore, how attention works.
An effective way to show where people look is to place dots on the places they gazed at. Plunking dots where the observers’ eyes came to rest on inspected stimuli shows where the fovea (the part of the retina used for objectperception) settled to get sustained exposure to regions of interest. Between those visual fixations, the eyes jumped, or made
saccades
, the French word for “jolts” or “jerks.”
Some of the earliest imposed-dot pictures came from a Russian physiologist named Alfred Yarbus, who used primitive but scientifically path-breaking equipment to learn how people look at pictures. He found that people inspect pictures in nonrandom ways. 16 When they were shown a picture of a girl, for instance, they tended to look at the girl’s eyes and mouth. They looked much less at her chin, ears, or hair. Yarbus showed that where observers looked depended on what they were looking for. The same picture attracted different gaze patterns depending on what question observers were trying to answer.
If you look where you attend, does that mean you attend only where you look? Can you attend to other places as well? What internal processes cause you to have your attention drawn to a given location? Is attraction always drawn to
locations
? And what, if anything, does the jungle principle have to say about these matters?
Moving your eyes from place to place hardly seems like a series of victories, yet is it. For your eyes to jump to some location, internal processes must pull your eyes from where they are to some other spot. There are
By this way of thinking, you don’t have to see attention as something mysterious. Attention exists, according to the view suggested here, because there are factions in the nervous system whose fates ultimately depend on the actions carried out.
An implication of this view is that any attentional bottlenecks that might exist in the nervous system should exist at the action side. A cognitive psychologist at the University of California (San Diego), Harold Pashler, has argued for this position. 14 He has described experiments that fit with the action-selection (or response-selection) hypothesis. Instructions to subjects in his experiments go something like this.
1. If a light appears on the left, press a button with your left hand.
2. If a light appears on the right, press a button with your right hand.
3. If a tone sounds, press a foot pedal.
4. Carry out each action as quickly and as accurately as possible.
In the actual experiment, the tone (for the foot) is often presented very soon after one of the lights comes on (either for the left hand or right). In conditions of special interest, the tone may come on so soon after the light appears that it actually comes on before the hand response is made. The interesting result is that the second (foot) response is delayed by an especially long time in this circumstance, as if the second (foot) response cannot be selected until the first (hand) response has been.
There is no
a priori
reason why this should be. A foot and a hand can move together, as is obvious from watching a drummer pound a bass drum with her foot while she taps a cymbal with her hand. Her hands and feet can move at the same time.
According to Pashler, the reason for the delayed foot response in the light-then-tone experiment is that the foot response can’t be selected until the hand response has been. If one response is selected first, the second selection must wait its turn. 15
Looking Behavior
One way you can see attention playing out in action selection is in people’s looking behavior. It’s not uncommon to see heads turning synchronously when a bunch of oglers notices an attractive passerby. Outside of group settings, eye movements of individuals acting alone provide a window to attentional states. By recording where individuals look, researchers have studied what captures people’s attention and, therefore, how attention works.
An effective way to show where people look is to place dots on the places they gazed at. Plunking dots where the observers’ eyes came to rest on inspected stimuli shows where the fovea (the part of the retina used for objectperception) settled to get sustained exposure to regions of interest. Between those visual fixations, the eyes jumped, or made
saccades
, the French word for “jolts” or “jerks.”
Some of the earliest imposed-dot pictures came from a Russian physiologist named Alfred Yarbus, who used primitive but scientifically path-breaking equipment to learn how people look at pictures. He found that people inspect pictures in nonrandom ways. 16 When they were shown a picture of a girl, for instance, they tended to look at the girl’s eyes and mouth. They looked much less at her chin, ears, or hair. Yarbus showed that where observers looked depended on what they were looking for. The same picture attracted different gaze patterns depending on what question observers were trying to answer.
If you look where you attend, does that mean you attend only where you look? Can you attend to other places as well? What internal processes cause you to have your attention drawn to a given location? Is attraction always drawn to
locations
? And what, if anything, does the jungle principle have to say about these matters?
Moving your eyes from place to place hardly seems like a series of victories, yet is it. For your eyes to jump to some location, internal processes must pull your eyes from where they are to some other spot. There are
Similar Books
Formerly Fingerman
Joe Nelms
The Lodger
Marie Belloc Lowndes
dEaDINBURGH: Origins (Din Eidyn Corpus Book 3)
Mark Wilson
As Black as Ebony
Salla Simukka
Broken Places
Wendy Perriam
Spanking Shakespeare
Jake Wizner
Party at Silver Spires
Ann Bryant
Don't Even Think About It
Roisin Meaney
The Faerie War
rachel morgan