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APPLYING ATTENTION IN THE REAL WORLD :PENCIL2: P+C2 LECTURE 4 - Coggle…
APPLYING ATTENTION IN THE REAL WORLD
:PENCIL2:
P+C2 LECTURE 4
Dual-tasks
Dual-task Decrement
The performance difference between a task on its own and with another task is called the dual task decrement.
Different models explain the decrement:
Structural early selection models
say that the cost is due to task switching.
Capacity models
say the decrement is due to both tasks drawing on the same reserves of capacity.
Can we actually dual-task?
True dual tasking is not really possible, we switch between the two tasks we are attending to constantly.
Not doing them in parallel.
Half the capacity available to complete one task in dual-tasking.
Dual tasking performance seems possible
Reading and dictation study
But is harder within modalities than between
Harder to do two visual tasks at the same time than to do one visual and one auditory task at the same time.
Can you drive whilst using your phone?
Strayer et al. (2003)
Used car simulation
Two phases:
Single driving task
Dual task hands-free conversation with a confederate.
In high density traffic and low density traffic simulation
Results...
Participants were slower to break, kept breaking for longer and took longer to slow down in both types of traffic whilst dual tasking.
Participants also showed lower recognition of items from within the simulation in a surprise recognition test.
In car conversations do not seem to have the same impact.
12% fail the task to park in layby compared to 50% with hands-free conversation.
Can you drive whilst texting on your phone?
Drews et al. (2003)
No.
Used dual task method with driving/texting.
Dual-task decrements...
Slower breaking
More varied following distances
Showed more “failure to maintain lane” behaviour
Overall the effects are much worse than hands free conversation.
Why?
Hands free conversation and driving could be two tasks drawing on the same resource.
Possible to dual-task
Texting and driving could involve attention switching between two tasks.
Impossible to dual-task
Can you walk whilst using your phone?
Hyman et al. (2010)
Well yes, but there are costs.
Compared when walking and talking on the phone with:
Walking on your own.
Listening to MP3 player
Walking in pairs.
On the phone condition meant:
More changing direction and weaving
Less acknowledging others
They also missed a unicycling clown...
Dual-task Models: Task analysis
Workload models
Developed from Kahneman’s capacity models
Focus is on the demands of the task, the availability or otherwise of mental resources, and the impact of these on task outcomes.
Piloting a plane is a multi-task, in order of precedence:
(1) Maintain stability and forward momentum of the plane
(2) Navigate the plane using instruments, maps, etc. to avoid hazards and arrive at the intended destination.
(3) Lower priority tasks such as routine checks and listening to ATC communications.
Wickens' Model of Multi-tasking
Separate resources split into different areas within the model.
Stages of processing:
How far down the cognitive system is the process that underlies the task?
Codes of processing:
Spatial versus verbal (similar to WM)
Modalities
Visual versus Auditory
Tasks that male demands on different resources should be performed together better than tasks drawing on the same resources.
Wickens (2003)
Looked at the impact of information coming from two sources in different modalities or the same modality:
(1) Normal instruments plus verbal communications from ATC
(2) Normal instruments plus text update from ATC
Findings...
Found a slight improvement in simulated flight performance for condition 1.
Pilots in condition 1 scanned information about the outside world more than in condition 2.
But there were a number of “read back” errors in condition 1.
Can you learn and multi-task?
Mendoza et al. (2018)
No.
Had students watch a 20 minute TED talk.
Gave them a MCQ test afterwards.
Half the students were allowed to keep their cellphones.
Experimenters texted the students with phones during the lecture.
The MCQ test had separate items from each quarter of the lecture.
Findings...
Students with phones scored worse on the test.
Worse in the last quarter.
Performance was correlated with nomophobia
Fear of being away from your phone.
Dual-tasking in the real world
In the real world there are costs for Dual-tasking.
But it is inevitable and in some jobs you need to divide attention between different tasks.
The costs are less with two tasks from separate modalities than two tasks in the same modality.
Scanning in the real-world
Searches can be efficient (flat slopes)
Due to attributes in the stimuli (colour etc.)
Searches can be inefficient (steep slopes)
Due to conjunctions
Discrimination between target/non-targets
Search can be assisted and constrained by gist
Possibly by a non-selective pathway that extracts basic semantic information from the scene.
Medicine
Radiologists
View X-rays and other images for abnormalities etc.
How they search for these is determined by:
Elements of the visual scene
Expertise
Examined through eye-tracking
Measures the location and duration of eye gaze fixation.
Drew et al. (2013)
When shown x-rays for 200ms (faster than you can scan the whole screen) radiologists can detect abnormalities (Drew et al., 2013)
Before any eye movement.
At 70% accuracy
But localisation judgements after brief exposure were not accurate.
Experts can extract
gist
from the scene
That guides search.
Novice search patterns are not as efficient.
van der Gijp et al. (2017)
Experts tend to...
Fixate quicker on abnormalities
Spend less time on non-salient structures
Have different search patterns
Much more systematic search
Global/Focal search patterns.
Kok et al. (2012)
Used Expert vs. Resident vs. Student
View chest x-rays
Different pattern of abnormality
Diffuse pattern of abnormality
Focal patterns of abnormality
No abnormality
Different patterns of search amongst the groups
Students were less accurate in diagnosis when there was an abnormality.
Baggage search
McCarley et al. (2004)
Baggage screeners
Complex visual search task performed under time pressure
Search space is disorganised (unlike medical images)
Therefore it is difficult to develop gist.
Participants searched for a target over a number of trials and sessions.
Accuracy and speed improved with practice
But decreased with novel targets.
Improvement is in identification, not 'foraging'.
Sport
Bard & Fleury (1976)
Basketball players
Experts and novice players
Show scenes of play situations.
Response: “shoot, dribble, pass or stay”
Visual search patterns measured
Experts not faster in choices
But search patterns were different
Experts focused more on empty space and their teammates’ markers.
Savelsbergh et al. (2002)
Goalkeepers
Experts and novices
Viewed short videos of penalty kicks
Participants used a joystick to predict the direction and height of the kick
Participants eye movements were tracked
Experts were more accurate on direction and height of kick.
Waited longer to make their decision.
Experts fixated on fewer areas in the scene (more efficient search)
Focused on the kicking, non-kicking leg and the ball.
Novices focused more on the top half and hips of the kicker.
Wolfe et al. (2005)
Lab search targets present 50% of the time
But in real life looked-for “targets” are very rare.
0.3% for radiologists looking for abnormalities in mammograms
Target present in 1%, 10% or 50% (prevalence)
2000 trials (1%), or 200 trials (10% and 50%)
Reward for correct answers.
Accuracy affected by prevalence
Worrying inaccuracy at 1% prevalence.
Even with 4000 trials
Accuracy at 41% for 1% prevalence.
Driving
Underwood et al. (2002)
Novice and experts viewed a video of a demanding driving situation.
Joining a dual carriageway.
Novices looked around less and had less awareness of the situation.
Even when not having to drive.
Could be due to lack of expertise with dual carriageways.
Or perceptual narrowing due to stress.
Reduces use of peripheral vision used by experts, e.g. road position etc.
Attention in Schizophrenia
Automatic attention...
Fast, parallel
Seems to happen in Posner’s Cueing Task with uninformative peripheral cues.
Evidence by validity effect (faster responses to valid cue, even when they are uninformative)
Also happens with faces as central cues
And in fast, efficient searches
Controlled attention...
Slow, serial
Seems to be involved in some form of central cueing in Posner's task.
Attention in Schizophrenia
Tripathis et al. (2018)
“...substantial deficit in reasoning, planning, abstract thinking and problem solving have been extensively documented in schizophrenia”
In addition to Positive Symptoms (delusions, etc.), schizophrenia leads to deficits in cognitive processing.
98% of patients with schizophrenia fall short of their predicted cognitive function
May be an early warning of onset
Early evidence suggests that attention was one of the cognitive functions affected (
Nuechterlein and Dawson, 1984
)
Spatial Cueing in SZ...
Luck et al. (2006)
Set of letters in boxes
Cue was the removal of the box
Participants had to say which letter was cued.
A mask was placed on the array for 50ms, 100ms, and onward for 12 intervals.
Aim was to find how quick attention was to get to the cue and was there a difference between SZ patients and controls?
Found that patients’ increase in accuracy was similar to controls.
No real deficit here.
Around 200ms, people could accurately respond almost 100% of the time.
Visual Search in SZ...
Gold et al. (2007)
Used a simple search task but varied the parameters so that…
(a) One search type had a pop-out target (searching a small subset of items with a larger set)
(b) Other search needed more conjoined search (half of the distractors share a feature with the target)
Search A is a bottom-up search, Search B is a top-down controlled search.
In search
A
(bottom-up task) both groups have efficient searches.
7.8ms per item for patients, 5.3ms per item for controls.
In search
B
(top-down) task, the patients had the less efficient search
38.6 ms per item for patients vs 22.7ms per item for controls.
Attention in SZ...
Maruff et al. (1998)
(a) Normal cueing task peripheral cue (informative)
(b) Normal cueing task peripheral cue (uninformative)
(c) Cueing task 80% of peripheral cues uninformative (counter indicating)
Patients (solid bars) did well on the traditional cueing task compared to controls.
No real difference between patients and controls for the normal cueing task.
For uninformative peripheral cues, you get the validity effect and then inhibition of return (IoR) for both the controls and the patients.
But patients performed poorly on the counter-indicating task.
Controls used the counter-indicative cues to look in the opposite direction where the target would appear
Evidence of validity effect (cue effect on graph) means they were looking in the wrong place most of the time.
SZ Patients could not counteract automatic responding.
Fuller (2006)
4 search tasks:
Searches that required more attentional control had steeper slope for patients compared to controls (less efficient searches)
The deficit is in the “control of attention not the implementation of attention”.
The tasks that Schizophrenic patients do poorly on are tasks that require control of attentional focus.
Automatic tasks (classic cueing and pop out searches) are relatively intact.
Why? Executive function
A set of functions that allow us to have voluntary control over our behaviour.
Patients with SZ have deficits in:
Planning
Cognitive flexibility
Verbal fluency
All tasks that require control over behaviour.
So the attention deficit is part of this general deficit.
Schizophrenia
Using cueing task and search task basic attention orientation is reasonably unimpaired.
The main issues are with the top-down control of attention.
This links to the general deficit in executive processing.
Attention in Autism
Autism is “characterised by… impairments in social communication accompanied by unusual repetitive and stereotypical behaviours.”
This included an impairment in “joint attention”
The capacity to share attentional focus with other social partners.
Children with Autism have difficulty following eye gaze in everyday settings.
They don’t show responsiveness to joint attention, they don’t look where others look (
Nation & Penny, 2008
)
Eye gaze cueing (
Friesen & Kingston, 1998
etc.), may be part of the development of joint attention.
Eye-gaze cueing
Kyllianen & Hietanen (2004)
Eye gaze cueing seems to be reflexive.
Tested 12 high-functioning children with Autism and matched controls.
Classic eye gaze paradigm using real face (more like Driver, 1999 than Friesen & Kingston, 1998)
Also asked children about direction of gaze.
No significant difference between the two groups.
Both showed a validity effect at 200ms and 800ms
Suggests an automatic response.
Gillespie-Lynch et al. (2013)
Compared 24 children with an ASD diagnosis with controls.
Both for age and non-verbal mental age.
Used neutral and emotional faces as stimuli.
Found some effect of diagnosis
No validity effect as short STOA for children with ASD.
When non-verbal mental age was controlled for.
Slight deficit in automatic responding to eye gaze in children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
Zhao et al. (2017)
Tested cueing using a more complex task.
The environment is more complex than simply a face and a cue.
Cues provided by eye gaze or arrows.
Target (left or right) presented by audio (voice or tone) within each block, presented in the left or right ear.
Found an effect of eye gaze over arrows for controls.
But only for voice targets
No difference between arrow and eye gaze as cues with ASD children.
Autism
Cueing using eye-gaze is not badly impaired in Autism.
Seems to be an automatic response.
But the picture is mixed.
When tasks are more complex, the results indicate that there may be differences compared to controls (neuro-typically developing children).
Attention in Dyslexia
Dyslexia:
“Individuals with dyslexia have difficulties with accurate or fluent word recognition and spelling despite adequate instruction and intelligence and intact sensory abilities.” (
Lyon et al., 2003
)
Cueing tasks:
Facoetti et al. (2001)
Found that DDC (developmental dyslexic children) were slower overall in a peripheral cueing task.
No validity effect for DDC in the right visual field.
But was present in the left visual field (indeed more so than controls)
With endogenous cue (central/symbolic) (bottom graph) at 750ms
Found a validity effect in both groups and in both visual fields.
Suggested causes
E.g. a phonological deficit or issue with the Magnocellular system.
May not be due to single underlying deficit - but one of these might be
attention
.
Facoetti et al. (2010)
Looked at cueing in children with dyslexia compared to controls.
Two conditions:
Normal peripheral cueing (non-informative)
Auditory presentation of cues and target.
Found validity/Cueing effect for controls and for DDC without issues with non-words.
DD children with poor non-word production did not show validity effects.
What more do we know now?
There appears to be issues with automatic/exogenous cueing in DDC.
Not so much with endogenous cues.
So automatic attention control is atypical in DDC.
But not controlled attention.
How does attention contribute to the development of dyslexia?
Attention shift is “sluggish’
Lessening the ability to move from letter to letter across the page.
Lessening the ability to suppress flanking non-focus letters.
But why only Right Visual Field and only children with issues with non-word (phonological recoding) problems?
Conclusions...
Using search tasks we can:
Examine how individual’s search in the real world in key situations.
Examine what type of attentional control deficit can be seen in Schizophrenia patients.
Using the Posner paradigm, we can:
Examine what types of attention are in deficit in Autism, Schizophrenia and Dyslexia
Although the picture is sometimes confused and we have found support for some explanatory models.