Selective Attention

• 16-2 How does selective attention direct our perceptions?

Through selective attention, our awareness focuses, like a flashlight beam, on a minute aspect of all that we experience. We may think we can fully attend to a conversation or a class lecture while checking and returning text messages. Actually, our consciousness focuses on but one thing at a time.

selective attention

the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus.

By one estimate, our five senses take in 11,000,000 bits of information per second, of which we consciously process about 40 (Wilson, 2002). Yet our mind’s unconscious track intuitively makes great use of the other 10,999,960 bits.

What captures our limited attention? Things we deem important. A classic example of selective attention is the cocktail party effect—your ability to attend to one voice among a sea of other voices. But what happens when another voice speaks your name? Your cognitive radar, operating on your mind’s other track (and in your right frontal cortex), instantly brings that unattended voice into consciousness (Demeter & Woldorff, 2016). This effect might have prevented an embarrassing and dangerous situation in 2009, when two Northwest Airlines pilots “lost track of time.” Focused on their laptops and in conversation, they ignored alarmed air traffic controllers’ attempts to reach them and overflew their Minneapolis destination by 150 miles. If only the controllers had known and spoken the pilots’ names.

Selective Attention and Accidents

Text, attend to your musical selections, or chat on your phone while driving, and your selective attention will shift back and forth between the road and its electronic competition. Indeed, our attention shifts more often than we realize. One study left people in a room for 28 minutes with full Internet and television access. On average, they guessed their attention switched 15 times. But they were not even close. Eye-tracking revealed eight times that many attentional switches—120 in all (Brasel & Gips, 2011).

Rapid toggling between activities is today’s great enemy of sustained, focused attention. When we switch attentional gears, especially when we shift to complex tasks like noticing and avoiding cars around us, we pay a toll—a slight and sometimes fatal delay in coping (Rubenstein et al., 2001). When a driver attends to a conversation, activity in brain areas vital to driving decreases an average of 37 percent (Just et al., 2008).

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You may wish to think about how the information on selective attention relates to something a little less dangerous: studying. The same principles apply. The more time you spend texting, tweeting, and social networking, the less focused you’ll be on the material you’re trying to master. A better strategy is to spend 25 minutes doing schoolwork and schoolwork alone. Then you can reward yourself with a few minutes of online time.

Texting or phone chatting—something 1 in 4 drivers admit doing—accompanies about 28 percent of traffic accidents (NSC, 2010; Pew, 2011). One video cam study of teen drivers found that driver distraction from passengers or phones occurred right before 58 percent of their crashes (AAA, 2015). Talking with passengers raises the risk of an accident 1.6 times above normal. Using a cell phone (even a hands-free set) carries a risk 4 times higher than normal—equal to the risk of drunk driving (McEvoy et al., 2005, 2007). And while talking is distracting, texting wins the danger game. One 18-month video cam study tracked the driving habits of long-haul truckers. When they were texting, their risk of a collision increased 23 times (Olson et al., 2009)! Many European countries and most American states and Canadian provinces now ban texting while driving (CBC, 2014; Rosenthal, 2009). So the next time you’re behind the wheel, put the brakes on your texts. Your passengers, fellow drivers, and selective attention will thank you.

“I wasn’t texting. I was building this ship in a bottle.”

The man is holding a glass bottle and says to the policeman, “I wasn’t texting. I was building this ship in a bottle.”

Driven to distraction In driving-simulation experiments, people whose attention is diverted by cell-phone conversation make more driving errors.

Inattentional Blindness

At the level of conscious awareness, we are “blind” to all but a tiny sliver of visual stimuli. Ulric Neisser (1979) and Robert Becklen and Daniel Cervone (1983) demonstrated this inattentional blindness dramatically by showing people a one-minute video of basketball players, three in black shirts and three in white shirts, tossing a ball. Researchers told the viewers to press a key every time they saw a black-shirted player pass the ball. Most viewers were so intent on their task that they failed to notice a young woman carrying an umbrella saunter across the screen midway through the video (Figure 16.2). Watching a replay of the video, viewers were astonished to see her (Mack & Rock, 2000). This inattentional blindness is a by-product of what we are really good at: focusing attention on some part of our environment.

inattentional blindness

failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere.

Figure 16.2 Selective inattention

Viewers who were attending to basketball tosses among the black-shirted players usually failed to notice the umbrella-toting woman sauntering across the screen (Neisser, 1979).

The image shows six basketball players and a woman walking by with an umbrella. The players are standing in a circle throwing a basketball back and forth. Three of the players are wearing black shirts and three of the players are wearing white shirts. The image of the woman holding the umbrella is faded, indicating that she is walking through the scene as they pass the ball around. The umbrella is red and she is wearing a green jacket and blue skirt.

In a repeat of the experiment, smart-aleck researchers sent a gorilla-suited assistant through the swirl of players (Simons & Chabris, 1999). During its 5- to 9-second cameo appearance, the gorilla paused and thumped its chest. But the gorilla did not steal the show: Half the conscientious pass-counting viewers failed to see it. Psychologists like to have fun and have continued to do so with invisible gorillas. One study of “inattentional deafness” delivered, separately to each ear, a recording of men talking and of women talking. When volunteers were assigned to pay attention to the women, 70 percent failed to hear one of the men saying, over and over for 19 seconds, “I’m a gorilla” (Dalton & Fraenkel, 2012). And when 24 radiologists were looking for cancer nodules in lung scans, 20 of them missed the gorilla superimposed in the upper right of Figure 16.3—though, to their credit, their focus enabled them to spot the much tinier cancer tissue (Drew et al., 2013). The serious point to this psychological mischief: Attention is powerfully selective. Your conscious mind is in one place at a time.

Figure 16.3 The invisible gorilla strikes again

When repeatedly exposed to the gorilla in the upper right while searching for much tinier cancer nodules, radiologists usually failed to see it (Drew et al., 2013).

Given that most people miss someone in a gorilla suit while their attention is riveted elsewhere, imagine the fun that others can have by manipulating our selective attention. Misdirect people’s attention and they will miss the hand slipping into the pocket. “Every time you perform a magic trick, you’re engaging in experimental psychology,” says magician Teller, a master of mind-messing methods (2009). Clever thieves know this, too. One Swedish psychologist was surprised in Stockholm by a woman exposing herself; only later did he realize that he had been pickpocketed, outwitted by thieves who understood the power of selective inattention (Gallace, 2012).

In other experiments, people exhibited a form of inattentional blindness called change blindness. In laboratory experiments, viewers failed to notice that, after a brief visual interruption, a big Coke bottle had disappeared, a railing had risen, clothing had changed color—and construction workers had changed places (Figure 16.4). (Chabris & Simons, 2010; Resnick et al., 1997). Out of sight, out of mind.

change blindness

failing to notice changes in the environment; a form of inattentional blindness.

Figure 16.4 Change blindness

While a man (in red) provides directions to a construction worker, two experimenters rudely pass between them carrying a door. During this interruption, the original worker switches places with another person wearing different-colored clothing. Most people, focused on their direction giving, do not notice the switch (Simons & Levin, 1998).

The man providing the directions is wearing a red sweater and has white hair. The construction worker is wearing a grey jacket and a white shirt. He has light brown hair and is holding a piece of paper.

The panel interrupts the man providing directions as they abruptly pass between them. The panel blocks the man’s view of the construction worker, so the original worker is able to switch places with another person wearing different-colored clothing.

The man who switched places with the original construction worker is wearing a beige jacket and has dark brown hair. He is also holding a piece of paper. The man in the red sweater giving the directions does not appear to have noticed the change and continues giving directions.

A Swedish research team discovered that people’s inattentional blindness extends to their own choices. Petter Johansson and his colleagues (2005, 2014) showed 120 volunteers two female faces and asked which face was more attractive. After putting both photos face down, they handed viewers the one chosen and invited them to explain why they preferred it. But on 3 of 15 occasions, the researchers secretly switched the photos—showing viewers the face they had not chosen (Figure 16.5). People noticed the switch only 13 percent of the time, and readily explained why they preferred the face they had actually rejected. “I chose her because she smiled,” said one person (after picking the solemn-faced one). Asked later whether they would notice such a switch in a “hypothetical experiment,” 84 percent insisted they would.

Figure 16.5 Choice blindness

Petter Johansson, Lars Hall, and others (2005) invited people to choose preferred faces. On occasion, they asked people to explain their preference for the unchosen photo. Most—failing to notice the switch—readily did so.

The first photo shows a researcher flashing photos of two different women. The second photo shows the same thing, but with a volunteer pointing toward the woman in the first photo. The third photo shows the researcher sliding the chosen photo face down toward the volunteer. The last photo shows the volunteer holding up and viewing the photo of the woman not chosen.

Change deafness can also occur. In one experiment, 40 percent of people focused on repeating a list of words that someone spoke failed to notice a change in the person speaking (Vitevitch, 2003). In two follow-up phone interview experiments, only 2 of 40 people noticed that the female interviewer changed after the third question—a change that was noticeable if people were forewarned of a possible interviewer change (Fenn et al., 2011). Some stimuli, however, are so powerful, so strikingly distinct, that we experience popout. For example, when the female phone interviewer changed to a male interviewer, virtually everyone noticed.