PSY270H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Visual Search, Inattentional Blindness, Distracted Driving

• School: UTSG
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY270H1
• Professor: Christine Millicent Burton

Document Summary

Everyone knows what attention is, but nobody can define it. There are several theories of the mechanisms of attention; each one explains how attention is used under different circumstances. Attention as a filter selective attention. Attention as a mental resource divided attention. Attention as a feature binder visual search. Attention is the process of concentrating mental effort on sensory or mental events. There are many different types of attention but they all vary along certain dimensions. Exogenous: something in environment captures our attention. Endogenous: we decide what to attend to, could be internal or external. Most closely linked to eye movements, quite a close link between attention and eye movements. Question of whether attention moves when our eyes move. Overt: we pay attention to what we"re looking at, other people know what we"re paying attention to. Covert: we are not looking at what we are attending, so other people don"t know what we are paying attention to.