Perception and Attention
Because perceiving is more than simply detecting the information provided by the information reaching the retina or the tympanic membrane, Chap. 8 emphasizes the role of attention in perception. After describing change blindness and attentional blindness
- PDF / 290,775 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 13 Downloads / 198 Views
Perception and Attention
This final chapter is dedicated to the study of attention because perception cannot be reduced to the sole detection of stimuli. It is necessary to try to understand how what is already in the brain determines or influences what is going to be perceived. This influence was already noted on several occasions in the preceding chapters: when Helmholtz’ hypothesis about unconscious inferences was referred to, or when studying form recognition or Gestalt’s organization principles for accounting for visual or auditory perception. Just for providing some idea of the impact of attention on perception, one should consider the following facts. There exists a scientific society, the Psychonomic Society, dedicated to experimental psychology and founded in the USA in 1959. This society is responsible (now with Springer) for the publication of several scientific journals. One of these journals, Perception and Psychophysics, was founded in the 1960s. Dedicated to research in the fields of perception and psychophysics, the journal kept the same name until 2008. Since 2009, the journal’s name is Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. Indeed, in 1988, 5 % of articles published in the journal were associated somehow to the study of attention; 20 years later, it was close to 50 %. Given that no important scientific journal had the word attention in its name, it has been decided to change P&P’s name in order to better reflect its content. Indeed, this situation illustrates to what extent the processes linked to attention are crucial when perceiving and for understanding the mechanisms of perception. For studying attention, it is imperative to look at its main properties. Any tentative for presenting the properties of attention will likely be incomplete given the huge amount of studies on this topic. Although the study of the attentional mechanism founded on neuroscientific approaches increased considerably in the past 30 years (see Gazzaniga, Ivry, & Mangun, 2009), the present chapter proposes only an overview of the main concepts linked to the study of attention offered by the behavioral studies and developed in cognitive psychology in the past 60 years.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 S. Grondin, Psychology of Perception, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31791-5_8
123
124
8.1
8 Perception and Attention
What Is Attention?
Attention is the process allowing to become aware of a few things and to capture a part, admittedly very limited, of what is going on around. Indeed, it is extremely difficult to define attention precisely, although most of us probably already know what it is. We know that when concentrating on a sound source through noise, it is possible to increase chances to capture the message targeted. Also, even when driving a car becomes an easy task, we know that it is preferable, for the sake of attention, to lower the intensity level of radio for mobilizing all resources in a situation that would suddenly become more complicated (increased traffic, uncertainty about the street,
Data Loading...
