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Chapter 6 discusses visual attention, exploring its definition, mechanisms, and the factors influencing it. It highlights key experiments, such as Cherry and Broadbent's selective listening and Posner's precueing, demonstrating how attention can enhance perception and reaction times. The chapter also addresses the physiological aspects of attention and its implications for understanding perception and cognitive processes.

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Pe 6

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CHAPTER 6

Visual Attention

CHAPTER CONTENTS
!." What Is Attention? !.% Things That Influence Visual !.' What Happens When We Don’t
!.# The Diversity of Attention Scanning Attend?
Research Visual Salience DEMONSTRATION: Change Detection
Attention to an Auditory Message: DEMONSTRATION: Attentional !.( Distraction by Smartphones
Cherry and Broadbent’s Selective Capture Smartphone Distractions While
Listening Experiments The Observer’s Interests and Goals Driving
Attention to a Location in Space: Scene Schemas Distractions Beyond Driving
Michael Posner’s Precueing Task Demands
Experiment !.) Disorders of Attention:
TEST YOURSELF 6.1 Spatial Neglect and Extinction
METHOD: Precueing
!.& The Benefits of Attention SOMETHING TO CONSIDER: Focusing
Attention as a Mechanism for Binding
Attention Speeds Responding Attention by Meditating
Together an Object’s Features: Anne
Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory Attention Influences Appearance DEVELOPMENTAL DIMENSION: Infant
DEMONSTRATION: Visual Search !.! The Physiology of Attention Attention and Learning Object
Attention to Objects Increases Activity Names
!.$ What Happens When We Scan in Specific Areas of the Brain
a Scene by Moving Our Eyes? METHOD: Head-Mounted Eye
Attention to Locations Increases Tracking
Scanning a Scene With Eye Movements Activity in Specific Areas of the
How Does the Brain Deal With What TEST YOURSELF 6.2
Brain
Happens When the Eyes Move? Attention Shifts Receptive Fields THINK ABOUT IT

Some Questions We Will Consider: unconscious inference and predictive coding, that involve
mental processing to understand how the information
■ Why do we pay attention to some parts of a scene but not
provided by the image on the retina becomes transformed
to!others? (p. 130)
into perception.
■ Does paying attention to an object make the object
The idea that mental processing plays an important role in
“stand!out”? (p. 134)
determining our perceptions is a story that continues through-
■ How does distraction affect driving? (p. 138) out this book. This chapter continues this story by describing
■ How does damage to the brain affect where a person at- how we pay attention to certain things and ignore others, and
tends to in space? (p. 141) what that means for visual processing.

I
The idea of paying attention to some things while ignor-
n Chapter 5 we saw that our perception of objects and ing others was described in the 19th!century by William James
scenes can’t be explained by considering only the image on (1842–1910), the first professor of psychology at Harvard.
the retina. Although the image on the retina is important, James relied not on the results of experiments but rather on
we also need to consider explanations, such as!Helmholtz’s his own personal observations when making statements such

123

Copyright 2022 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
as the following description of attention, from his 1890 text-
book Principles of Psychology: 6.2 The Diversity
Millions of items … are present to my senses which
never properly enter my experience. Why? Because
of Attention Research
they have no interest for me. My experience is what I Continuing with the idea that we direct our attention to dif-
agree to attend to … Everyone knows what attention ferent things and in different ways, we will now describe three
is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear different approaches to attention. These approaches both il-
and vivid form, of one out of what seem several si- lustrate the diversity of attention research, and provide exam-
multaneously possible objects or trains of thought … ples of classic experiments from the early history of modern
It implies withdrawal from some things in order to attention research, which began in the 1950s.
deal effectively with!others.
Thus, according to James, we focus on some things to the Attention to an Auditory Message:
exclusion of others. As you walk down the street, the things
you pay attention to—a classmate you recognize, the “Don’t
Cherry and Broadbent’s Selective
Walk” sign at a busy intersection, the fact that just about ev- Listening Experiments
eryone except you seems to be carrying an umbrella—stand out One of the first modern attention experiments involved hear-
more than many other things in the environment. The reason ing. Colin Cherry (1953) used a technique called dichotic
you are paying attention to those things is that saying hello to listening, where dichotic refers to presenting different stimuli to
your friend, not crossing the street against the light, and your the left and right ears. Cherry’s experiment involved selective
concern that it might rain later in the day are all important attention, because the participant’s task was to selectively focus
to you. on the message in one ear, called the attended ear, and to repeat
But there is also another reason for paying attention to what he or she is hearing out loud. This procedure of repeating
some things and ignoring others. Your perceptual system has the words as they are heard is called shadowing (Figure 6.1).
a limited capacity for processing information (Carrasco, 2011; Cherry found that although his participants could easily
Chun et al., 2011). Thus, to prevent overloading the system shadow a spoken message presented to the attended ear, and
and therefore not processing anything well, the visual system, they could report whether the unattended message was male
in James’s words, “withdraws from some things in order to deal or female, they couldn’t report what was being said in the un-
more effectively with others.” attended ear. Other dichotic listening experiments confirmed
that people are not aware of the information being presented
to the unattended ear. For example, Neville Moray (1959)
6.1 What Is Attention? showed that participants were unaware of a word that had
been repeated 35 times in the unattended ear. The ability to
Attention is the process which results in certain sensory in- focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli is called
formation being selectively processed over other information. the cocktail party effect, because at noisy parties people are
The key words in the definition above are selectively processed, able to focus on what one person is saying even though there
because they mean that something special is happening to are many conversations happening at the same time.
whatever is being attended.
This definition, while correct, does not capture the wide
range of things we attend to, such as a specific object (a foot-
ball player running down the field; a building on campus),
a particular place (a location where someone is supposed
to meet you; the projection screen at the front of a class-
room), a specific sound (a conversation at a party; a siren The meaning The yellow
of life is… dog chased…
in the street), or a particular stream of thought (“what am
I going to do tonight?” “What is the solution to this math
problem?”).
In addition to attending to different types of things, we The yellow
dog chased…
can attend in different ways. One way of paying attention,
called overt attention, occurs when you move your eyes from
one place to another, to focus on a particular object or loca-
tion. Another way of paying attention, called covert attention,
occurs when you shift attention without moving your eyes, as Figure 6.1 In the shadowing procedure, which involves dichotic
might occur when you are looking at the person you are talk- listening, a person repeats out loud the words in the attended
ing to but are keeping track of another person who is off to message as they hear them. This ensures that participants are
the side. focusing their attention on the attended message.

124 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

Attended
message

Based on results such as these, Donald Broadbent (1958)

presented off to the side (as shown in the right panel). The trial
created a model of attention designed to explain how it is pos-
shown in Figure 6.3a is a valid trial because the square appears
sible to focus on one message and why information isn’t taken
on the side indicated by the cue arrow. The location indicated by
in from other messages. The model proposed something that
the cue arrow was valid 80 percent of the time, but 20 percent
was revolutionary in the psychology of the 1950s—a flow dia-
of the trials were invalid; that is, the arrow cue indicated that
gram that pictured attention as a sequence of steps. This flow
the target was going to be presented on one side but it actually
diagram provided researchers with a way of thinking about at-
appeared on the other side, as shown in Figure 6.3b. For this
tention in terms of processing information, much like com-
invalid trial, the arrow cue indicates that the participant should
puter flow diagrams that were being introduced at that time.
attend to the left, but the target is presented on the right.
Broadbent’s flow diagram, shown in Figure 6.2, shows a
number of messages entering a filter unit, which lets through
the attended message, and filters out all of the other messages.
The results of this experiment, shown in Figure 6.3c, indi-
The attended message is then detected by the detector unit and
cate that participants reacted more rapidly in a detection task
is perceived. We won’t go into the details of Broadbent’s model
on valid trials than on invalid trials. Posner interpreted this
here. Its main importance is that it provides a mechanism by
result as showing that information processing is more effective
which attention makes the attended stimulus available for more
processing. As we will see next, Michael Posner took another ap- See cue Respond to target
proach, which highlighted the effect of attention on processing.

Attention to a Location in Space: + +

Michael Posner’s Precueing Experiment
We often pay attention to specific locations, as when paying (a) Valid trial
attention to what is happening in the road directly in front of
our car when driving. Paying attention informs us about what
is happening at a location, and also enables us to respond more
rapidly to anything that happens in that location.
Attention to a specific location is called spatial + +
attention. In a classic series of studies on spatial attention,
Michael Posner and coworkers (1978) asked whether paying
covert attention to a location improves a person’s ability to (b) Invalid trial
respond to stimuli presented there. To answer this question,
Posner used the precueing procedure. 325

300
Reaction time (ms)

METHOD Precueing 275

The general principle behind a precueing experiment is to de-
termine whether presenting a cue indicating where a test stimu- 250
lus will appear enhances the processing of the test stimulus. The 225
participants in Posner and coworkers’ (1978) experiment kept
their eyes stationary throughout the experiment, always look- 200
ing at the 1 in the display in Figure 6.3. They first saw an arrow
cue (as shown in the left panel) indicating on which side of the 0
target a stimulus was likely to appear. In Figure 6.3a, the arrow (c) Results Valid Invalid
cue indicates that participants should focus their attention to the Figure 6.3 Procedure for the (a) valid task and (b) invalid task in
right. (Remember, they do this without moving their eyes, so Posner and coworkers’ (1978) precueing experiment. See text for
this is an example of covert attention.) The participants’ task was details. (c) The results of the experiment. The average reaction time
to press a key as rapidly as possible when a target square was was 245 ms for valid trials but 305 ms for invalid trials. (Figures a–b from
Posner et al., 1978)

6.2 The Diversity of Attention Research 125

Features Features
separated combined

Figure 6.6 Flow diagram of Treisman's (1988) feature integration

theory in which features like color and shape exist independently in
the preattentive stage and then are combined to create objects in
the focused attention stage.

Figure 6.4 Spatial attention can be compared to a spotlight that

scans a scene. Based on results such as these plus the results of other
experiments, Treisman proposed feature integration theory
at the place where attention is directed. This result and others like (FIT) (Treisman & Gelade, 1980; Treisman, 1985). An early
it gave rise to the idea that attention operates like a spotlight version of the theory, shown in Figure 6.6, proposes that the
or zoom lens that improves processing when directed toward a first step in processing an object is the preattentive stage. In
particular location (Figure 6.4; Marino & Scholl, 2005). this stage, features of the object are analyzed rapidly and un-
consciously, and at this stage the features exist independently
of one another. So the red triangle would be analyzed into in-
Attention as a Mechanism for Binding dependent features “red” and “triangle” and the green circle
Together an Object’s Features: Anne into “green” and “circular.” In the second stage, the focused
Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory attention stage, attention becomes involved, and conscious
perception occurs. Conscious perception involves a process
Consider the following stimulus used by Anne Treisman and called binding, in which individual features are combined, so
Hilary Schmidt (1982). A participant briefly saw a display like the viewer sees “red triangle” or “green circle.” In other words,
the one in Figure 6.5 and was told to report the identity of the during normal viewing, attention combines an object’s fea-
black numbers first and then to report what they saw at each tures so we perceive the object correctly. Illusory conjunctions
of the four locations where the shapes had been. Participants can occur when attention to the object is distracted, as in the
reported the numbers correctly, but on about one-fifth of the experiment.
trials they reported seeing objects at the other locations that Treisman’s theory resulted in many experiments sup-
were made up of a combination of features from two differ- porting the idea of two stages of processing, one unconscious
ent stimuli. For example, after being presented with the display and not involving attention (the preattentive stage) and the
in Figure 6.5, in which the small triangle is red and the small other conscious and involving attention (the focused attention
circle is green, they might report seeing a small green triangle. stage). One type of experiment used to make this distinction
This combination of features is called an illusory conjunction. involved a procedure called visual search, which is something
we do anytime we look for an object among a number of other
objects, like trying to find Waldo in a Where’s Waldo? picture
(Handford, 1997).

DEMONSTRATION Visual Search

1 8
In this demonstration, your task is to find a target item that
is surrounded by other, distractor, items. First, try finding the
horizontal line in Figure 6.7a. Then find the horizontal green line
in Figure 6.7b. The first task is called a feature search, because
you could find the target by looking for a single feature, “hori-
zontal.” The second task is a conjunction search, because you
had to search for a combination (or conjunction) of two or more
features, “horizontal” and “green.” In this task you couldn’t just
focus on horizontal, because there were horizontal red bars, and
Figure 6.5 Stimuli for Treisman and Schemidt’s (1982) experiment. you couldn’t just focus on green, because there were vertical
When participants first attended to the black numbers and then green bars. You had to look for the conjunction between green
to the other objects, some illusory conjunctions, such as “green and horizontal.
triangle” occurred.

126 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

800 What all of these early experiments have in common is

that they showed, in different ways, how attention can influ-
700
ence perception, and they set the stage for much of the re-
search on attention we will describe in the remainder of this
chapter, which focuses on studying (1) the mechanisms that
600
create attention and (2) different ways in which attention in-
fluences how we experience our environment. In the next sec-
500
tion we will consider an important mechanism that creates
attention—the shifting of attention from one place to another
4 8 16 by eye movements.
Display size

Figure 6.7 Find the horizontal line in (a) and then the green
horizontal line in (b). Which task took longer? (c) Typical result of
visual search experiments in which the number of distractors is 6.3 What Happens When
We Scan a Scene by Moving
varied for different search tasks. The reaction time for the feature
search (green line) is not affected by the number of distractors, but
adding distractors increases reaction time for the conjunction search
(red line). Our Eyes?
Overt attention is attention that occurs when you move your
This demonstration illustrates the difference between the eyes from one place to another. One way to get it touch with
two stages in Treisman’s theory. The feature search was accom- the nature of eye movements is to look for things in a scene.
plished rapidly and easily because you didn’t have to search for Try this by seeing how many birds with white heads you can
the horizontal bar. It just “popped out” of the display. This is find in Figure 6.8.
an example of automatic processing, which does not require
a conscious search. In contrast, the conjunction search did
require a conscious search, corresponding to the focused at-
Scanning a Scene With Eye Movements
tention stage of FIT, because you had to find the conjunction As you looked for the white-headed birds you probably noticed
between two properties. that you had to scan the scene, looking from one place to an-
Treisman demonstrated a difference between the two other. Scanning is necessary because good detail vision occurs
types of search by having participants find targets, as in only for things which you are looking at directly, as illustrated
the demonstration, and varying the number of distractors. by the task on page 54, which showed that while looking at
Figure 6.7c, which shows the results of a typical experiment of the letter on the right, it was difficult to identify the letters to
this kind, indicates that the speed of feature search is unaffected the left.

6.3 What Happens When We Scan a Scene by Moving Our Eyes? 127

Bruce Goldstein
This difference occurs because of the way the retina is con- scanning this scene is an example of overt attention, but that
structed. Objects you are looking at (central vision) fall on the covert attention—attending off to the side—is also involved be-
fovea (see page 41), which has much better detail vision than cause it helps determine where we are going to look next. Thus,
objects off to the side (peripheral vision), which fall on the pe- covert attention and overt attention often work together.
ripheral retina. Thus, as you scanned the scene in Figure 6.8,
you were aiming your fovea at one object after another. Each
time you paused briefly, you were making a fixation. When How Does the Brain Deal With What
you moved your eye to the next object, you were making a Happens When the Eyes Move?
saccadic eye movement—a rapid, jerky movement from one
We’ve seen that eye movements direct our attention to what
fixation to the next.
we want to see. But in the process of shifting the gaze from
It isn’t surprising that you were moving your eyes from
one place to another, eye movements also do something else:
one place to another, because you were trying to find details in
They cause the image on the retina to become smeared. Con-
the scene. But it may surprise you to know that even when you
sider, for example, Figure 6.10a, which shows the scan path
are freely viewing an object or scene without searching for any-
as a person first fixates on the finger and then moves his eyes
thing in particular, you move your eyes about three times per
to the ear. While this movement of the eyes is shifting overt
second and more than 200,000 times a day. This rapid scanning
attention from the finger to the ear, the image of everything
is shown in Figure 6.9, which is a pattern of fixations (yellow
located between the finger and ear is sweeping across the retina
dots) separated by saccadic eye movements (lines) that occurred
(Figure 6.10b). But we don’t see a blurred image. We see a sta-
as a participant viewed the picture of the fountain. Note that
tionary scene. How can that be?
The answer to this question is provided by corollary
discharge theory (Helmholtz, 1863; Subramanian, et al., 2019;
Maria Wachala/Getty Images (Scanning measurements by James Brockmole)

Sun & Goldberg, 2016; von Holst & Mittelstaedt, 1950; Wurtz,
2018). The first step in understanding corollary discharge the-
ory is to consider the following three signals associated with
movement of the eyes (Figure 6.11).
1. The motor signal (MS) occurs when a signal to move the
eyes is sent from the brain to the eye muscles.
2. A corollary discharge signal (CDS) is a copy of the mo-
tor signal, so occurs whenever there is a motor signal.
3. The image displacement signal (IDS) occurs when an
image moves across the retina, as happens when move-
ment of the eye causes the image of a stationary scene to
sweep across the retina (Figure 6.11).
According to corollary discharge theory, the brain con-
Figure 6.9 Scan path of a person freely viewing a picture. tains a structure called the comparator. The comparator op-
Fixations are indicated by the yellow dots and eye movements by erates according to the following rule: When only the CDS or
the red lines. Notice that this person looked preferentially at some the IDS signal reaches it, movement is perceived. But when
areas of the picture, but is ignoring other areas. both signals reach the comparator, no movement is perceived.

128 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

nal image by alerting the brain that the eye is moving, move-
ment of the eyes also causes another problem: Each eye move-
(b) ment causes the scene to change. First there’s a finger in the
(b) center of a scene, then moments later an ear appears, and a
Figure 6.10 (a) Fixation on the person’s finger followed by eye
movement and then fixation on the person’s ear. (b) As the eye moment after that, something else takes center stage. Thus,
moves between the finger and the ear, different images fall on the what happens on the retina is like a series of snapshots that
fovea. Some of these images are indicated by what’s inside each are somehow processed so we see not “snapshots” but a sta-
circle. Since the eye is moving, these images aren’t still images, but tionary scene.
smear across the retina as the eye scans from finger to ear. Luckily, the corollary discharge not only keeps our world
stationary as our eyes move, but it also deals with the snap-
shot problem by helping the brain prepare for what is com-
Motor ing next. Martin Rolfs and coworkers (2011) determined this

MS CDS

IDS Comparator

Figure 6.11 Explanation based on corollary discharge theory for why

we don’t see a smeared image when we move our eyes from one
place to another. (1) A motor signal (MS) is sent from the motor area
to the eye muscles; (2) the corollary discharge signal (CDS), which is a
copy of the motor signal, is sent to the comparator; (3) the eye moves
Bruce Goldstein

in response to the MS and this movement causes an image to move

across the retina, generating an image displacement signal (IDS),
which travels out the back of the eye to the comparator, where it meets
the CDS. When the IMS meets the CDS, the CDS inhibits perception of Figure 6.12 Why is this woman smiling? Because when she
the smeared image on the retina caused by movement of the eye. pushes on her eyelid, so her eye moves, she sees the world jiggle.

6.3 What Happens When We Scan a Scene by Moving Our Eyes? 129

6.4 Things That Influence

Visual Scanning
William James’s statement, “Attention involves withdrawing
from some things in order to effectively deal with others” leads
to the question, “what causes us to direct our attention toward
things we want to deal with and away from things we want to
withdraw from?” We will answer this question by describing a
number of things that influence where people shift their atten-
tion by moving their eyes.

Visual Salience Figure 6.14. An example of attention capture: When participants

are instructed to find the green circle, they often look at the red
Some things in the world draw our attention because they diamond first. (Theeuwes, 1992)
stand out against their backgrounds. For example, the man in
the red shirt in Figure 6.13 is conspicuous because his shirt’s
color starkly contrasts with the whites and pale blues worn
It probably wasn’t too difficult to find the green circle and to
by everyone else in the scene. Scene regions that are markedly
determine that it contains a horizontal line. But did you look
at the red diamond first? Most people do. The question is, why
would they do so? You were asked to find a green circle, and the
red diamond is neither green nor a circle. Regardless, people at-
tend to the red diamond because it is highly salient, and salient
items attract people’s attention (Theeuwes, 1992). Research-
ers use the term attentional capture to describe situations like
this, in which properties of a stimulus grab attention, seem-
ingly against a person’s will. Even though attentional capture
can distract us from what we want to be doing, capture is an
important means of directing attention because conspicuous
stimuli like rapid movement or loud sounds can capture our
attention to warn us of something dangerous like an animal or
object moving rapidly toward us.
To investigate how visual salience influences attention in
scenes that do not contain a single salient object, researchers
have developed an approach in which they analyze characteris-
tics such as color, orientation, and intensity at each location in
Ales Fevzer/CORBIS

a scene and combine these values to create a saliency map of

the scene. A saliency map reveals which regions are visually dif-
ferent from the rest of the scene (Itti & Koch, 2000; Parkhurst
et al., 2002; Torralba!et!al., 2006). Figure 6.15 shows a scene
Figure 6.13 The red shirt is highly salient because it is bright and (a) and its saliency map (b) as determined by Derrick Parkhurst
contrasts with its surroundings. and coworkers (2002). Regions of greater visual salience are

130 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

(a) Visual scene

Scene Schemas
Attention is also influenced by scene schemas—an observer’s
knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes (remember
our discussion of regularities of the environment in Chapter 5,
page 105). Thus, when Melissa Võ and John Henderson
(2009) showed pictures like the ones in Figure 6.17, observers
looked longer at the printer in Figure 6.17a than the pot in
Figure 6.17b because a printer is less likely to be found in a
kitchen. The fact that people look longer at things that seem
out of place in a scene means that attention is being affected by
Vision Research/Elsevier

their knowledge of what is usually found in the scene.

Another example of how cognitive factors based on knowl-
edge of the environment influences scanning is an experiment
by Hiroyuki Shinoda and coworkers (2001) in which they
measured observers’ fixations and tested their ability to detect
(b) Saliency map traffic signs as they drove through a computer-generated envi-
Figure 6.15 (a) A visual scene. (b) Saliency map of the scene ronment in a driving simulator. They found that the observ-
determined by analyzing the color, contrast, and orientations in the ers were more likely to detect stop signs positioned at inter-
scene. Lighter areas indicate greater salience. (Adapted from Parkhurst et al., 2002) sections than those positioned in the middle of a block, and

6.4 Things That Influence Visual Scanning 131

Unexpected, 1884–88 (oil on canvas), Repin, Ilya Efimovich (1844-1930)/Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia/Bridgeman Images; Lucs-kho
(b) determined the ages of the people, (c) had
to remember the clothes worn by the people,
or (d) had to remember the positions of the
people and objects in the room. The scan
paths show that subjects’ eye movements are
strongly influenced by the task.

(a) (b) Determine ages of people.

(c) Remember clothing. (d) Remember the positions of

the people and objects.

that 45 percent of the observers’ fixations occurred close to

(a) intersections. In this example, the observers are using learning
about regularities in the environment (stop signs are usually at
corners) to determine when and where to look for stop signs.

Task Demands
The examples in the last section demonstrate that knowledge
of various characteristics of the environment can influence
how people direct their attention. However, the last example,
in which participants drove through a computer-generated en-
vironment, was different from the rest. The difference is that
(b) instead of looking at pictures of stationary scenes, participants
were interacting with the environment. This kind of situation,
in which people are shifting their attention from one place to
another as they are doing things, occurs when people are mov-
ing through the environment, as in the driving example, and
when people are carrying out specific tasks.
Because many tasks require shifting attention to different
places as the task unfolds, it isn’t surprising that the timing
of when people look at specific places is determined by the se-
quence of actions involved in the task. Consider, for example,
the pattern of eye movements in Figure 6.18, which were mea-
Figure 6.17 Stimuli used by Vo and Henderson (2009). Observers sured as a person was making a peanut butter sandwich. The
spent more time looking at the printer in (a) than at the pot in (b), process of making the sandwich begins by removing a slice of
shown inside the yellow rectangles (which were not visible to the bread from the bag and putting it on the plate. This operation
observers). is accompanied by an eye movement from the bag to the plate.

132 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

Copyright 2022 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
5. What is spatial attention? Describe Posner’s experiment
on speeding response to locations. Be sure you under-
stand the precueing procedure, covert attention, and
what Posner’s results demonstrated.
6. What does feature integration theory propose?
7. Describe two types of visual search: feature search and
conjunction search. How are these two types of searches
affected by the number of distractors in a display?
8. How do these two types of searches relate to the two
stages of Treisman’s feature integration theory?
9. What is the difference between central vision and periph-
Figure 6.18 Sequence of fixations of a person making a peanut
eral vision and how is this relevant to eye movements?
butter sandwich. The first fixation is on the loaf of bread. (From Land &
Hayhoe, 2001) 10. What are fixations? Saccadic eye movements?
11. Describe how the corollary discharge theory explains
The observer then looks at the peanut butter jar just before it why we don’t see a scene as smeared when we move
is lifted and looks at the top just before it is removed. Atten- our eyes.
tion then shifts to the knife, which is picked up and used to 12. Why does the scene appear to move when we push on
scoop the peanut butter and spread it on the bread (Land & our eyelid?
Hayhoe, 2001). 13. Describe predictive remapping of attention. Why is it
The key finding of these measurements, and also of an- necessary?
other experiment in which eye movements were measured as a 14. Describe the following factors that determine where we
person prepared tea (Land et al., 1999), is that the person’s eye look: visual salience, observer goals, scene schemas,
movements were determined primarily by the task. The per- and scanning based on task demands. Describe the ex-
son fixated on few objects or areas that were irrelevant to the amples or experiments that illustrate each factor.
task, and eye movements and fixations were closely linked to
the action the person was about to take. Furthermore, the eye
movement usually preceded a motor action by a fraction of a
second, as when the person first fixated on the peanut butter
jar and then reached over to pick it up. This is an example of
the “just in time” strategy—eye movements occur just before
6.5 The Benefits
we need the information they will provide (Hayhoe & Ballard,
2005; Tatler et al., 2011).
of Attention
The examples we have described in connection with scan- What do we gain by attending? Based on our description of
ning based on cognitive factors and task demands have some- overt attention that is associated with eye movements, we
thing in common: They all provide evidence that scanning is might answer that question by stating that shifting attention
influenced by people’s predictions about what is likely to hap- by moving our eyes enables us to see places of interest more
pen (Henderson, 2017). Scanning anticipates what a person is clearly. This is extremely important, because it places the things
going to do next as they make a peanut butter and jelly sand- we’re interested in front-and-center where they are easy to see.
wich; scanning anticipates that stop signs are most likely to be But some researchers have approached attention not by
located at intersections; and pausing scanning to look longer measuring factors that influence eye movements, but by con-
at an object occurs when a person’s expectations are violated, sidering what happens during covert attention, when atten-
as when a printer unexpectedly appears in a kitchen. tion is shifted without making eye movements, as occurred in
Posner’s precueing experiments that we described at the begin-
ning of the chapter (p. 125).
TEST YOURSELF 6.1
One reason Posner studied covert attention is that it is a
1. What are the two main points that William James makes way of studying what is happening in the mind without the
about attention? (Hint: what it is and what it does.) What interference of eye movements. We will now consider more re-
are two reasons for paying attention to some things and cent research on covert attention, which shows how shifting
ignoring others? attention “in the mind” can affect how quickly we can respond
2. Define attention, overt attention, and covert attention. to locations and to objects, and how we perceive objects.
3. Describe Cherry’s dichotic listening experiment. What did
it demonstrate?
Attention Speeds Responding
4. What is the central feature of Broadbent’s model of
attention? Posner’s precueing study showed how covert attention re-
sulted in faster responding to the cued locations. We will now

6.5 The Benefits of Attention 133

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Cue
Attention Influences Appearance
Does the fact that attention can result in faster reaction times
C A 374 ms C A 324 ms show that attention can change the appearance of an object?
Not necessarily. It is possible that the target stimulus always
+ + looks the same, but attention enhances the observer’s ability to
press the button quickly. To answer the question of whether at-
D B D B 358 ms tention affects an object’s appearance, we need to do an experi-
ment that measures the perceptual response to a stimulus rather
Present cue...................Cue off...................Present target
than the speed of responding to the stimulus.
(a) (b) In a paper titled “Attention Alters Appearance,” Marisa
Carrasco and coworkers (2004) showed that attention affected
Figure 6.19 In Egley and coworkers’ (1994) experiment, (a) a cue the perceived contrast between the alternating light and dark
signal appears at one place on the display, then the cue is turned off
bars like the ones in Figure 6.20c, where perceived contrast
and (b) a target is flashed at one of four possible locations, A, B, C,
refers to how different the light and dark bars appear.
or D. Numbers are reaction times in ms for positions A, B, and C,
when the cue appeared at position A. (From Egly et al., 1994) The procedure for Carrasco’s experiment, shown in
Figure 6.20, was as follows:
consider some experiments that show (1) that when attention
(a) Participants were instructed to keep their eyes fixed on
is directed to one part of an object, the enhancing effect of that
the small fixation dot at all times.
attention spreads to other parts of the object, and (2) that at-
(b) A cue dot was flashed for 67 ms either on the left or on
tention can influence appearance. Consider, for example, the
the right. Even though participants were told that this
experiment diagrammed in Figure 6.19 (Egly et al., 1994). As
dot wasn’t related to what happened next, it functioned
participants kept their eyes on the 1, one end of the rectangle
to shift their covert attention to the left or to the right.
was briefly highlighted (Figure 6.19a). This was the cue signal
(c) A pair of gratings, one tilted to the left and the other tilted
that indicated where a target, a dark square (Figure 6.19b),
to the right, was flashed for 40 ms. The contrast between
would probably appear. In this example, the cue indicates that
the bars of the gratings was randomly varied from trial
the target is likely to appear in position A, at the upper part of
to trial, so sometimes the contrast of the right grating
the right rectangle. (The letters used to illustrate positions in
was higher, sometimes the contrast of the left grating was
our description did not appear in the actual experiment.)
higher, and sometimes the two gratings were identical.
The participants’ task was to press a button when the tar-
The participants indicated, by pressing a key, whether the
get was presented anywhere on the display. The numbers indi-
grating stimulus with the highest contrast was tilted to
cate their average reaction times, in milliseconds, for three tar-
the left or to the right.
get locations when the cue signal had been presented at A. Not
surprisingly, participants responded most rapidly when the Carrasco found that when two gratings were physically iden-
target was presented at A, where the cue had been presented. tical, participants were more likely to report the orientation of the
However, the most interesting result is that participants re- one that was on the same side as the flashed cue dot. Thus, even
sponded more rapidly when the target was presented at B though the two gratings were the same, the one that received at-
(reaction time 5 358 ms) than when the target was presented tention appeared to have more contrast (see also Liu et al., 2009).
at C (reaction time 5 374!ms). Why does this occur? It can’t be In addition to perceived contrast, a variety of other percep-
because B is closer to A than C, because B and C are exactly the tual characteristics are affected by attention. For example, at-
same distance from A. Rather, B’s advantage occurs because it tended objects are perceived to be bigger, faster, and more richly
is located within the object that was receiving the participant’s colored (Anton-Erxleben et al., 2007; Fuller & Carrasco, 2006;
attention. Attending at A, where the cue was presented, causes Turatto et al., 2007), and attention increases visual acuity—the
the maximum effect at A, but the effect of this attention spread sharpness of vision (Montagua et al., 2009). Thus, more than
throughout the object so some enhancement occurred at B as 100 years after William James suggested that attention makes
well. The faster responding that occurs when enhancement an object “clear and vivid,” researchers have provided experi-
spreads within an object is called the same-object advantage mental evidence that attention does, in fact, enhance the ap-
(Marino & Scholl, 2005). pearance of an object. (See Carrasco & Barbot, 2019.)

Figure 6.20 Procedure for Carrasco and

Cue flashed
coworkers’ (2004) experiment. See text for
explanation.

Fixation dot

(a) Fixate (b) Cue flashed (c) Gratings flashed

134 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

A large number of experiments have shown that attention af-

fects physiological responding in a variety of ways. We begin Attention to Locations Increases Activity
by considering evidence that attention increases the neural re- in Specific Areas of the Brain
sponse to an attended item.
What happens in the brain when people shift their attention
covertly to different locations while keeping their eyes station-
Attention to Objects Increases Activity ary? Ritobrato Datta and Edgar DeYoe (2009; see also Chiu &
Yantis, 2009) answered this question by measuring how brain
in Specific Areas of the Brain activity changed when covert attention was focused on dif-
In an experiment by Kathleen O’Craven and coworkers ferent locations. They measured brain activity using fMRI as
(1999), participants saw a face and a house superimposed participants kept their eyes fixed on the center of the stimulus
(Figure 6.21a). You may remember the experiment from shown in Figure 6.22a and shifted their attention to different
Chapter 5 in which a picture of a house was presented to one locations within the display. Because the eyes did not move,
eye and a picture of a face was presented to the other eye (see the visual image on the retina did not change. Nevertheless,
Figure 5.47, page 114). In that experiment, presenting different they found that patterns of activity within the visual cortex
images to each eye created binocular rivalry, so perception al- changed depending on where a participant was directing his
ternated between the two images. When the face was perceived, or her attention.
activation increased in the fusiform face area (FFA). When the The colors in the circles in Figure 6.22b indicate the area
house was perceived, activation increased in the parahippo- of brain that was activated when a participant directed his at-
campal place area (PPA). tention to the locations indicated by the letters on the stimu-
In O’Craven’s experiment, the superimposed face and lus in Figure 6.19a. Notice that the yellow “hot spot,” which
house stimuli were presented to both eyes, so there was no bin- is the place of greatest activation, is near the center when the
ocular rivalry. Instead of letting rivalry select the image that is participant is paying attention to area A, near where he is look-
visible, O’Craven told participants to direct their attention to ing. But shifting his attention to areas B and C, while keeping
one stimulus or the other. For each pair, one of the stimuli was the eyes stationary, causes the increase in brain activity to move
stationary and the other was moving slightly back and forth. out from the center.
When looking at a pair, participants were told to attend to ei- By collecting brain activation data for all of the loca-
ther the moving or stationary house, the moving or stationary tions on the stimulus, Datta and DeYoe created “attention
face, or to the direction of movement. As they were doing this, maps” that show how directing attention to a specific area
activity in their FFA, PPA, and MT/MST (an area specialized of space activates a specific area of the brain. These attention
for movement that we will discuss in Chapter 8) was measured. maps are like the retinotopic map we described in Chapter 4

2.5 2.5 Figure 6.21 (a) Superimposed face

and house stimulus used in O’Craven and
2.0 2.0 coworkers’ (1999) experiment. (b) FFA
Signal change (%)

activation when the subject attended to

1.5 1.5
the face or the house. (c) PPA activation
for attention to the face or the house. (Based
1.0 1.0 on data from O’Craven et al., 1999)

.5 .5

0 0
Fa H Fa H
c ou ce ou
e se se

Attended stimulus Attended stimulus

(a) Stimulus (b) FFA Activity (c) PPA Activity

6.6 The Physiology of Attention 135

(see Figure 4.12, page 75), in which presenting objects at differ-

ent locations on the retina activates different locations on the
brain. However, in Datta and DeYoe’s experiment, brain activa-
tion is changing not because images are appearing at different
places on the retina, but because the participant is directing his
or her mind to different places in the visual field.
What makes this experiment even more interesting is that
after attention maps were determined for a particular partici-
pant, that participant was told to direct his or her attention to
a “secret” place, unknown to the experimenters. Based on the (a) (b)
location of the resulting yellow “hot spot,” the experimenters
Figure 6.23 Receptive field maps on the retina determined
were able to predict, with 100 percent accuracy, the “secret”
when a monkey was looking at the fixation spot (white) but paying
place where the participant was attending. This is similar to attention to locations indicated by the arrows: (a) the diamond or
the “mind reading” experiment we described in Chapter 5, in (b) the circle. The arrows were not included in the display seen by
which brain activity caused by an oriented line was analyzed the monkey. The yellow areas are areas of the receptive field that
to determine what orientation the person was seeing (see generate the largest response. Notice that the receptive field map
Figure 5.48, page 115). In the attention experiments, brain ac- shifts to the right when the monkey shifts its attention from the
tivity caused by where the person was attending was analyzed to diamond to the circle. (From Womelsdorf et al., 2006)
determine where the person was directing his or her mind!
attention. This concentrates neural processing power at the
place that is important to the monkey at that moment. As we
Attention Shifts Receptive Fields continue exploring how the nervous system creates our per-
ceptions, we will encounter other examples of how the flex-
In Chapter 4 we showed how presenting vertical bars outside a
ibility of our nervous system helps us function within our ever-
neuron’s receptive field can increase the rate of firing to a verti-
changing environment.
cal bar located inside the receptive field (see Figure 4.33, page
86). We now describe a situation in which attention can shift
the location of a neuron’s receptive field. Theo Womelsdorf
and coworkers (2006) demonstrated this by recording from
neurons in a monkey’s temporal lobe. Figure 6.23a shows the
6.7 What Happens When
location of a neuron’s receptive field when the monkey was
keeping its eyes fixed on the white dot, but was paying atten-
We Don’t Attend?
tion to the diamond location indicated by the arrow. Figure We have seen that paying attention affects both responding to
6.23b shows how the location of the receptive field shifted stimuli and perceiving them. But what happens when we don’t
when the monkey’s attention shifted to the circle location in- pay attention? One idea is that you don’t perceive things you
dicated by the arrow. In both of these examples, yellow indi- aren’t attending to. After all, if you’re looking at something over
cates the area of the retina that, when stimulated, causes the to the left, you’re not going to see something else that is far to
greatest response. the right. But research has shown not only that we miss things
This shifting of the receptive field, depending on where that are out of our field of view, but that not attending can cause
the monkey is attending, is an amazing result because it means us to miss things even if we are looking directly at them. One ex-
that attention is changing the organization of part of the vi- ample of this is a phenomenon called inattentional blindness.
sual system. Receptive fields, it turns out, aren’t fixed in place In 1998, Arien Mack and Irvin Rock published a book ti-
but can change in response to where the monkey is paying tled Inattentional Blindness, in which they described experiments

136 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

Bruce Goldstein
the screen that they had not seen before. Out of 20 participants,
only 2 reported that they had seen the square. In other words,
most of the participants were “blind” to the small square, even
though it was located right next to the cross. Figure 6.25 Frame from Simons and Chabris’s (1999) experiment.
This demonstration of inattentional blindness used a rap-
idly flashed geometric test stimulus. But similar effects occur After seeing the video, participants were asked whether
for more naturalistic stimuli that are visible for longer periods they saw anything unusual happen or whether they saw any-
of time. For example, imagine looking at a display in a depart- thing other than the six players. Nearly half of the observers
ment store window. When you focus your attention on the dis- failed to report that they saw the woman or the gorilla. This
play, you probably fail to notice the reflections on the surface experiment demonstrated that when people are attending to
of the window. Shift your attention to the reflections, and you one sequence of events, they can fail to notice another event,
become less aware of the display inside the window. even when it is right in front of them (also see Goldstein &
The idea that attention can affect perception of overlap- Fink, 1981; Neisser & Becklen, 1975).
ping scenes was tested in an experiment by Daniel Simons and Following in the footsteps of inattentional blindness ex-
Christopher Chabris (1999), who created a 75-second film that periments, researchers developed another way to demonstrate
showed two “teams” of three players each. One team, dressed how a lack of attention can affect perception. Instead of pre-
in white, was passing a basketball around, and the other was senting several stimuli at the same time, they first presented
“guarding” that team by following them around and putting one picture, then another slightly different picture. To appreci-
their arms up as in a basketball game (Figure! 6.25). Partici- ate how this works, try the following demonstration.
pants were told to count the number of passes, a task that fo-
cused their attention on the team wearing white. After about DEMONSTRATION Change Detection
45 seconds, one of two events occurred. Either a woman carry-
When you are finished reading these instructions, look at the
ing an umbrella or a person in a gorilla suit walked through the
picture in Figure 6.26 for just a moment, and then turn the
“game,” an event that took 5 seconds.
page and see whether you can determine what is different in
Figure!6.27. Do this now.

Trials 1–5 Trial (6)

(a) (b)

Figure 6.24 Inattentional blindness experiment. (a) The cross

Bruce Goldstein

display is presented for five trials. One arm of the cross is slightly
longer on each trial. The participant's task is to indicate which arm
(horizontal or vertical) is longer. (b) On the sixth trial, the participants
carry out the same task, but a small square is included in the Figure 6.26 Stimulus for change-blindness demonstration.
display. After the sixth trial, participants are asked if they saw See text.
anything different than before. (From Cartwright-Finch & Lavie, 2007; Lavie, 2010)

6.7 What Happens When We Don’t Attend? 137

Smartphone Distractions While Driving

Driving presents a paradox: in many cases, we are so good at
it that we can operate on “auto-pilot,” as when we are driv-
ing down a straight highway in light traffic. However, in other

Bruce Goldstein
cases, driving can become very demanding, as when traffic in-
creases or hazards suddenly present themselves. In this latter
case, distractions that result in a decrease in attention to driv-
Figure 6.27 Stimulus for change-blindness demonstration. ing are particularly dangerous.
See text. The seriousness of driver inattention was verified by a re-
search project called the 100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study
(Dingus et al., 2006). In this study, video recorders in 100 ve-
hicles created records of both what the drivers were doing and
the view out the front and rear windows. These recordings
Were you able to see what was different in the second documented 82 crashes and 771 near crashes in more than
picture? People often have trouble detecting the change even 2 million miles of driving. In 80 percent of the crashes and
though it is obvious when you know where to look. (See the 67 percent of the near crashes, the driver was inattentive in
bottom of page 146 for a hint and then try again.) Ronald some way 3 seconds beforehand. One man kept glancing down
Rensink and coworkers (1997) did a similar experiment in and to the right, apparently sorting through papers in a stop-
which they presented one picture, followed by a blank field, and-go driving situation, until he slammed into an SUV. A
followed by the same picture but with an item missing, fol- woman eating a hamburger dropped her head below the dash-
lowed by a blank field, followed by the original picture, and board just before she hit the car in front of her. One of the
so on. The pictures were alternated in this way until observers most distracting activities was pushing buttons on a smart-
were able to determine what was different about them. Rensink phone or similar device. More than 22 percent of near crashes
found that the pictures had to be alternated back and forth a involved that kind of distraction, and it is likely that this num-
number of times before the difference was detected. This diffi- ber may be higher now because of increases in smartphone use
culty in detecting changes in scenes is called change blindness since that study.
(Rensink, 2002). In a laboratory experiment on the effects of smartphones,
Change blindness occurs regularly in popular films, in David Strayer and William Johnston (2001) gave participants a
which some aspect of the scene, which should remain the same, simulated driving task that required them to apply the brakes
changes from one shot to the next. In the Wizard of Oz (1939), as quickly as possible in response to a red light. Doing this
Dorothy’s (Judy Garland’s) hair changes length many times task while talking on a phone caused participants to miss twice
from short to long and back again. In Pretty Woman (1990) Vivian as many of the red lights as when they weren’t talking on the
(Julia Roberts) began to reach for a croissant for breakfast that phone (Figure 6.28a) and also increased the time it took them
suddenly turned into a pancake. And magically, in Harry Potter to apply the brakes (Figure 6.28b). Perhaps the most impor-
and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) suddenly tant finding of this experiment is that the same decrease in
changed where he was sitting from one shot to the next during performance occurred regardless of whether participants used
a conversation in the Great Hall. These changes in films, called a hands-free or a handheld device.
continuity errors, have been well documented on the Internet Taking into account results such as these, plus many other
(search for “continuity errors in movies”). experiments on the effects of phones on driving, Strayer and
The message of the change blindness and inattentional coworkers (2013) concluded that talking on the phone uses
blindness experiments is that when we are paying attention to mental resources that would otherwise be used for driving the
one thing, we miss other things. Although change blindness car (also see Haigney & Westerman, 2001; Lamble et al., 1999;
and inattentional blindness were determined in laboratory ex- Spence & Read, 2003; Violanti, 1998). This conclusion that
periments, there are many examples in real life of things that the problem posed by phone use during driving is related to
distract us by grabbing our attention. A major perpetrator of the use of mental resources is an important one. The problem
this distraction is the smartphone, which has been accused of isn’t driving with one hand. It is driving with fewer mental re-
being “the prime culprit in hijacking attention” (Budd, 2017). sources available to focus on driving.

138 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

tention can degrade driving performance. And phones aren’t

the only attention-grabbing device found in cars. Most cars

Reaction time (ms)

.06
now feature screens that can display the same apps that are on
your phone. Some voice-activated apps enable drivers to make
.04 500
movie or dinner reservations, send and receive texts or emails,
and create posts on Facebook. An early system in Ford vehicles
.02 was called an “infotainment system.” But a study from the AAA
Foundation for Traffic Safety, Measuring Cognitive Distraction in
the Automobile, indicates that perhaps too much information and
0 450
No With No With entertainment while driving isn’t a good thing. The study found
cellphone cellphone cellphone cellphone
that voice-activated activities were more distracting, and there-
(a) (b)
fore potentially more dangerous, than either hands-on or hands-
Figure 6.28 Results of Strayer and Johnston’s (2001) cellphone free phones. The study concludes that “just because a new tech-
experiment. When participants were talking on a cellphone, they nology does not take the eyes off the road does not make it safe
(a) missed more red lights and (b) took longer to apply the brakes. to be used while the vehicle is in motion” (Strayer et al., 2013).
(From Strayer & Johnston, 2001)
Research such as this shows that attention affects not only
where we are looking as we are driving, but also how we are
But even though research clearly shows that driving while
thinking. But media’s effect on attention has extended far be-
talking on a phone is dangerous, many people believe it doesn’t
yond driving, as indicated by scenes like the one in Figure 6.29,
apply to them. For example, in response to a class assignment,
which shows that you don’t have to be in a car to have your
one of my students wrote, “I do not believe my driving is affected
attention captured by your phone! We now consider research
by talking on the phone … My generation learned to drive when
which shows that phones, and the Internet in general, can have
cell phones were already out. I had one before driving, so while
negative effects on many aspects of our behavior.
learning to drive, I also simultaneously learned to talk on the
phone and drive.” Thinking such as this may be why 27 percent
of adults report that they sometimes text while driving, even in
the face of overwhelming evidence that it is dangerous (Seiler, Distractions Beyond Driving
2015; Wiederhold, 2016). For example, a study by the Virginia The proliferation of smartphones has ushered in an
Tech Transportation Institute found that truck drivers who send era of unprecedented connectivity. Consumers around
text messages while driving were 23 times more likely to cause a the globe are now constantly connected to faraway
crash or near crash than truckers who were not texting (Olson et friends, endless entertainment, and virtually unlim-
al., 2009). Because of results such as these, which indicate that ited information … Just a decade ago, this state of
texting is even more dangerous than talking on a phone, most constant connection would have been inconceivable;
states now have laws against text-messaging while driving. today, it is seemingly indispensable. (Ward et al., 2017)

Figure 6.29 City scene showing people

walking and paying attention to their
smartphones.
Page Light Studios/[Link]

6.8 Distraction by Smartphones 139

Copyright 2022 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Many research studies have documented high usage of smart- demonstrated this in an experiment in which participants
phones and the Internet. For example, 92 percent of college took tests designed to measure cognitive functions that de-
students report that they have texted, browsed the web, sent pend on attention. Participants were divided into three groups,
pictures, or visited social networks during class time (Tindell based on where their smartphone was when they were taking
& Bohlander, 2012). By checking college students’ phone bills the tests. The “other room” group left their phone and other
(with their permission!), Judith Gold and coworkers (2015) belongings outside the testing room. The “pocket/bag” group
determined that they send an average of 58 text messages a took their belongings into the testing room, but kept their
day, and Rosen and coworkers (2013) showed that during a phone where they normally would, usually in their pocket or
15-minute study session, students averaged less than 6 min- bag. The “desk” group took only their phones into the testing
utes on-task before interrupting studying to stretch, watch TV, room and placed it face down on their desk. Participants in all
access websites, or use technology such as texting or Facebook. conditions were instructed to turn their phones to silent by
What’s particularly remarkable is how suddenly this has come turning off the ring and vibrate.
upon us. In 2007 only 4 percent of American adults owned One result of the study is shown in Figure 6.30, which
smartphones (Radwanick, 2012), but in 2019, just 12 years shows how participants scored on a test of working memory
later, 82 percent of American adults, and 96 percent between capacity. Working memory is a memory function that is in-
the ages of 18 and 29, owned smartphones (Pew Research volved in temporarily holding and manipulating information
Center, 2019; Ward et al., 2017). in the mind while carrying out tasks such as comprehension,
How often do you consult your phone? If you check your solving problems, and reasoning (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974;
phone constantly, one explanation of your behavior involves Goldstein & Brockmole, 2019). These results show that perfor-
operant conditioning, a type of learning in which behavior is mance in the “desk” and “pocket/bag” conditions were signifi-
controlled by rewards (called reinforcements) that follow behav- cantly lower than performance in the “other room” condition.
iors (Skinner, 1938). A basic principle of operant conditioning Thus, just having the phone within reach caused a decrease
is that the best way to ensure that a behavior will continue is to in working memory capacity. Ward also showed that having
reinforce it intermittently. So when you check your phone for a the phone on the desk caused a decrease in scores on a test of
message and it’s not there, well, there’s always a chance it will be intelligence. Based on these results, Ward and coworkers pro-
there the next time. And when it eventually appears, you’ve been posed that a potentially costly side effect of the presence of
intermittently reinforced, which strengthens future phone-
clicking behavior. Some people’s dependence on their phone is
captured in the following sticker, marketed by Ephemera, Inc: 35
“After a long weekend without your phone, you learn what’s re-
ally important in life. Your phone.” (See Bosker, 2016, for more 34
on how smartphones are programmed to keep you clicking.)
Constant switching from one activity to another has been 33
described as “continuous partial attention” (Rose, 2010), and
here is where the problem lies, because as we saw for driving, 32
Working memory capacity

distraction from a task impairs performance. It isn’t surpris-

ing, therefore, that people who text more tend to have lower 31
grades (Barks et al., 2011; Kuznekoff et al., 2015; Kuznekoff &
Titsworth, 2013; Lister-Landman et al., 2015), and in extreme 30
cases, some people are “addicted” to the Internet, where ad-
diction is defined as occurring when Internet use negatively 29
affects a number of areas of a person’s life (for example, social,
academic, emotional, and family) (Shek et al., 2016).
28
What’s the solution? According to Steven Pinker (2010),
given that the computer and Internet are here to stay, “the so-
27
lution is not to bemoan technology, but to develop strategies
of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life.”
26
This sounds like good advice, but sometimes powerful temp-
tations are difficult to resist. One example, for some people,
is chocolate. Another is checking their phone. So perhaps a 25
solution might be to decide to limit the number of times you Desk Pocket/Bag Other room
consult your phone. Phone location
But to make things even more interesting, a recent study Figure 6.30 How proximity of a smartphone affects working
has shown that even if you decide not to interact with your memory capacity. Working memory was lower when the phone
phone, its mere presence can have negative effects on mem- was in the same room—either on the desk or in the person’s bag or
ory and intelligence. Adrian Ward and coworkers (2017) pocket—compared to when it was in the other room. (From Ward et al., 2017)

140 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
smartphones is “smartphone-induced brain drain.” They sug- their right hemisphere behave as if the left half of their visual
gest that one way to prevent this brain-drain is “defined and world no longer exists (Driver & Vuillemier, 2001; Harvey &
protected periods of separation,” similar to the situation in the Rossit, 2012).
“other room” group who were physically separated from their One conclusion from symptoms such as these might
phones. This may be easier said than done, but at a minimum be that the person is blind on the left side of the visual field.
it seems unwise to have the phone in plain view on your desk, This was, in fact, an early explanation of neglect (Bay, 1950).
because it may be draining your attention, even though you But an experiment by Edoardo Bisiach and Claudio Luzzatti
think you are ignoring it. (1978) put an end to that explanation, by asking a patient
with neglect to describe things he saw when imagining himself
standing at one end of the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, a place
6.9 Disorders of Attention: with which he had been familiar before his brain was damaged
(Figure 6.32).
Spatial Neglect and The patient’s responses showed that he neglected the left
side of his mental image, just as he neglected the left side of
Extinction his perceptions. Thus, when he imagined himself standing at
A, he neglected the left side and named only objects to his right
We’ve seen that when we are paying attention to one thing, we (small a’s). When he imagined himself standing at B, he contin-
may miss other things. This is a consequence of the fact that we ued to neglect the left side, again naming only objects on his
can only focus our attention on one place at a time. But there right (small b’s). Thus, neglect can occur even if the person is
is a neurological condition called spatial neglect that exagger- imagining a scene with his or her eyes closed. Other research
ates this effect. also showed that patients with visual neglect do see things on
Consider, for example, the case of Burgess, a 64-year-old their left if they are told to pay attention to what’s on the left
male who had a stroke that caused damage to structures in his side of the environment. The problem in neglect, therefore,
parietal lobe on the right side of his brain. Burgess became un- seems to be a lack of attention to what’s on the left, rather than
aware of sounds, people, and objects that were in the left side a loss of vision on the left.
of his visual field. When he walked down the street, he hugged A condition that often accompanies neglect, extinction,
the right side of the pavement, brushing up against walls and is demonstrated in the laboratory as follows. A patient is told
hedges. He didn’t notice potential dangers coming from the to look at a “fixation cross,” so she is always looking straight
left, so couldn’t go out on his own (Hoffman, 2012). ahead, and when a light is flashed to her left side, she reports
This ignoring of the side of space opposite the side of the seeing the light. This indicates that she is not blind on her left
brain damage has been measured in clinical tests. As shown side. But if two lights are simultaneously flashed, one on the
in Figure 6.31, spatial neglect patients will (a) draw only the left and one on the right, she reports that she sees a light on
right side of an object when asked to draw it from memory, the right, but does not report seeing a light on the left. Thus,
(b) mark only target circles on the right side of a display, lack of awareness of what is happening on the left occurs when
and (c) place a mark far to the right when asked to mark a competing stimulus is presented on the right.
the center of a line. This rightward bias is also reflected in Extinction provides insight into attentional processing
everyday behaviors such as eating food only on the right side because it suggests that the unawareness of stimuli on the
of a plate and shaving or grooming only the right side of the left is caused by competition from the stimuli on the right,
face. In other words, people with neglect due to damage to with the left ending up being the loser. Thus, when there is a

(a) (b) (c)

Figure 6.31 Test results for a spatial neglect patient. (a) A starfish drawn from memory is missing its left
side; (b) when asked to mark target circles—the ones without a vertical stem—the patient only marked
circles on the right; (c) when asked to place a mark at the center of each horizontal line, the mark was placed
to the right of center. (From Harvey & Rossit, 2012)

6.9 Disorders of Attention: Spatial Neglect and Extinction 141

b (a) Ring on left flower on right

b b
a

a +
b B a
35 percent
b
b a a
(b) Flower on left ring on right
b
30 a
A a
a
b
b a +

b 78 percent

Figure 6.32 Piazza del Duomo in Milan. When Bisiach and (c) Spider on left ring on right
Luzzatti’s (1978) patient imagined himself standing at A, he could
name objects indicated by the a’s. When he imagined himself at B, Figure 6.33 A series of tests to determine the degree of
he could name objects indicated by the b’s. (Bisiach & Luzzatti, 1978) extinction for different pairs of stimuli. The number below the left
image indicates the percentage of trials on which that image was
identified by a patient who usually shows neglect of objects in the
left side of the visual field. (a) Ring on left, flower on right; (b) flower
stimulus only on the left, the signals generated by this stimu- on left, ring on right; (c) spider on left, ring on right. (Vuilleumier & Schwartz,
2001, Fig 1b)
lus are transmitted to the brain and the patients see the stimu-
lus. However, when a stimulus is added on the right, the same
signal is still generated on the left, but the patient doesn’t “see”
on the left because attention has been distracted by the more why do they, as in the case of the ring and the flower, often fail
powerful stimulus on the right. to report seeing them?
“Seeing” or “conscious awareness” is therefore a combi- What apparently is happening is that the flower and spi-
nation of signals sent from stimuli to the brain and attention der are processed by the brain at a subconscious level to de-
toward these stimuli. This happens in non-brain-damaged termine their identity, and then another process determines
people as well, who are often unaware of things happening off which stimuli will be selected for conscious vision. The identi-
to the side of where they are paying attention—but there is a fication at a subconscious level before attention has occurred
difference. Even though they may miss things that are off to is an example of preattentive processing, which we mentioned
the side, they are aware that there is an “off to the side”! at the beginning of the chapter in connection with Anne Treis-
There’s still more to learn from the phenomenon of extinc- man’s feature integration theory of attention (see page 126).
tion, because it turns out that extinction can be partially elimi- The patient isn’t aware of preattentive processing, because it
nated for certain types of stimuli. When a ring stimulus the patient is hidden and happens within a fraction of a second. What
has never seen before is presented on the left and a flower stimulus the patient is aware of is which stimuli are selected to receive
which also hasn’t been previously seen is presented on the right, the attention that leads to conscious vision (Rafel, 1994;
patients with visual neglect see the ring on only 12 percent of the Vuilleumier & Schwartz, 2001a, 2001b). Thus, neglect and ex-
trials (Figure 6.33a) (Treisman & Gelade, 1980; Treisman, 1985). tinction provide more examples of the role of attention in cre-
Extinction is therefore high when the ring is on the left. However, ating our conscious awareness of the environment.
when the stimuli are switched so the flower appears on the left,
perception rises to 35 percent (Figure 6.33b). Finally, when a spi-
der is presented on the left, it is seen on 78 percent of the trials SOMETHING TO CONSIDER:

Focusing Attention
(Figure 6.33c) (Vuilleumier & Schwartz, 2001a). In a similar ex-
periment, patients were more likely to see sad or smiley faces on the

by Meditating
left than neutral faces (Vuilleumier & Schwartz, 2001b).
Why is the patient more likely to see the spider? The an-
swer seems obvious: the spider attracts attention, perhaps
because it is menacing and causes an emotional response, Two people are sitting in chairs, feet on the ground, eyes closed.
whereas the flower shape does not. But how do patients know What’s going on in their minds? We can’t, of course, tell by
that the shape on the left is a spider or a flower? Don’t they looking, but we know that they are meditating. What’s that all
need to have seen the spider or flower? But if they’ve seen them, about, and what does it have to do with attention?

142 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Meditation is an ancient practice that originated in Buddhist meditators, who coined the term “monkey mind” to
Buddhist and Hindu cultures, which involves different ways of refer to a mind that is constantly active, often to the detriment
engaging the mind (Basso et al., 2019). In a common form of of focusing attention on a task or being able to relax without
meditation, called focused attention meditation, the person being bothered by all the thoughts created by the pesky mon-
focuses on a specific object, which can be the breath, a sound, key mind.
a mantra (a syllable, word, or group of words), or a visual So when our meditators sit down to meditate, their task is
stimulus. There are other types of meditation, as well, such as to turn off the monkey mind! To accomplish this, they focus
open-monitoring meditation, in which the person observes their attention on the in and out of their breathing, so their
thoughts, emotions, and sensations as they arise, in a nonjudg- consciousness is centered on “breathing in” and “breathing
mental way, and loving-kindness meditation, in which the per- out.” But invariably the monkey mind intrudes, and when the
son generates thoughts of love, kindness, and empathy toward person realizes that they are thinking about something other
others and themselves. In the remainder of this section, we will than their breath they acknowledge the thought, without be-
consider focused attention meditation. coming involved in it, and return their attention to the breath.
Most meditation practice in the United States is focused Meditation, therefore, involves a cycle of focused atten-
attention meditation, with the two most popular meditation tion, an interruption by mind wandering, awareness of the in-
apps, Calm and Headspace, emphasizing paying attention to terruption, then focusing attention back on the breath. What
the in and out of the breath. The fact that these apps are mul- this sequence demonstrates is that attention can be used not
timillion dollar businesses, each with over 1 million paying only to focus on a particular object, place, or activity, as we
subscribers, testifies to the growing popularity of meditation, have been discussing in most of this chapter, but can also be
as does the fact that the percentage of adults in the United used to “clear the mind” by turning off that sometimes annoy-
States who meditated in the last 12 months increased from ing monkey that keeps chattering in our head. As meditators
4.1 percent in 2012 to 14.2 percent in 2017, which translates become more practiced, they are able to spend more time in the
into 35 million adults in 2017 (Clarke et al., 2018). focused attention part of the cycle (Hasenkamp et al., 2012).
Let’s return to our meditators, who we left sitting with There’s an old Zen story about 15th century Zen Master
their eyes closed. Perhaps the best way to begin describing their Ikkyu, who, when asked for the source of the highest wisdom
experience is to consider what was going on in their minds be- answered, “Attention, attention, attention!” (Austin, 2009).
fore they sat down to meditate. One of the characteristics of What does this mean? It could be applied to the cycle of focus-
the mind is that it is very active. Engaging in specific tasks like ing and shifting attention we have just described. Another in-
studying or solving problems involves task-oriented attention. terpretation is that we could substitute the word “awareness”
But sometimes this task-oriented attention is interrupted by for attention (Beck, 1993).
thoughts that have nothing to do with the task. You may have Philosophical discussions about the importance of at-
experienced this if, as you were studying, your mind drifted tention in meditation and life in general aside, there is a great
off to contemplate something that is going to happen later, or deal of scientific evidence that meditation has many benefi-
something that happened earlier in the day. This type of non- cial effects, including pain relief (Zeidan & Vago, 2016), stress
task-oriented mind activity is called day dreaming or mind reduction (Goyal et al., 2014), improving cognitive functions
wandering. such as memory (Basso et al., 2019), and, not surprisingly, im-
Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert (2010) deter- proving the ability to focus attention (Moor & Malinowski,
mined the prevalence of mind wandering by using a technique 2009; Semple, 2010). Other experiments have shown not
called experience sampling, based on an iPhone app, which only that meditation affects behavior, but that it also affects
beeped at random times as participants went about their daily activity in areas of the brain associated with regulation of
lives. When they heard the beep, participants reported that thought and action (Fox et al., 2016) and causes reorganiza-
they were mind wandering 47 percent of the time. This scien- tion of neural networks that extend over large areas of the
tifically determined result would probably not be surprising to brain (Tang et al., 2017).

DEVELOPMENTAL DIMENSION Infant Attention and Learning Object Names

How do infants learn the names of objects? The answer to that child directs their attention to a particular object. Second, as the
question is complicated, but an important part of the answer is child is attending, the parent names the object. Until recently,
“by paying attention while interacting with an adult—usually a it has been difficult to study this interaction between attention
parent.” Another way of stating this is that infants typically learn and naming because of difficulties in measuring exactly where
words with a social partner, who is most often one of their par- an infant is directing their attention. But this problem has been
ents. There are two crucial aspects of this interaction. First, the solved by the development of head-mounted eye tracking.

Something to Consider: Focusing Attention by Meditating 143

Courtesy of Chen Yu, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin

ity and suitability for infants by fitting a perceiver with two
devices: (1) a head-mounted scene camera, which indicates the
orientation of the perceiver’s head and their general field of
view, and (2) an eye camera, which indicates the precise
location where the person is looking within that field of view
(Borjon et al., 2018).
Figure 6.34 shows an infant and parent wearing head-
mounted eye trackers while playing with toys. Figure 6.35
shows attention records recorded as an infant and parent
looked at three different toys, with purple indicating looking
at the partner’s face and the other colors indicating attention
to each toy. The infant’s fixations are on the top record and
the parent’s records are on the bottom record. The purple in
the bottom record indicate that the parent glances often at the Figure 6.34 Infant and parent wearing head-mounted tracking devices
infant’s face. In contrast, the infant’s fixations are focused on that measure where they are looking while playing with toys. The parent
the toys. is also wearing a microphone to determine when she is speaking.

face three objects

infant fixations

parent fixations

Figure 6.35 How infants and parents directed their attention during toy play. See text for an explanation of this figure. (From Yu et al., 2018)

Chen Yu and coworkers (2018) used head-mounted eye per minute. The relationship between naming and later vocab-
tracking to measure where 9-month-old infants and a par- ulary is especially important, because larger early vocabulary
ent were directing their attention as they were playing with is associated with better future language ability and school
toys, and the parent’s speech was recorded, in order to de- achievement (Hoff, 2013; Murphy et al., 2014).
termine where the infant was looking and when the parent The relationship between vocabulary at 12 months and
named a toy. naming at 9 months shown in Figure 6.36 is based on naming
By considering both the looking data and the speech data, that occurred during infant sustained attention—when the in-
Yu identified high-quality naming events—instances in which the fant’s attention was focused on an object for 3 seconds or lon-
parent named the object while the infant was looking at it. For ger. However, when Yu considered naming that occurred when
each infant, they multiplied the quality of naming—the propor- there was no sustained attention, but only joint attention (that
tion of naming that occurred when the infant was looking at is, when the infant and adult were looking at an object at the
the object—times the quantity of naming—the number of times same time, but the infant’s gaze lasted less than 3 seconds),
the parent named an object. Figure 6.36 plots the infant vo- they found that naming did not predict later vocabulary. Thus,
cabulary at 12 months versus the quality 3 quantity measure the crucial condition for infant name learning is focusing at-
determined at 9 months, with each data point representing an tention on an object for a sustained period of time, and then
individual infant–parent pair. The wide range in the quality 3 hearing the object’s name.
quantity measure reflects the fact that there were large indi- If word learning doesn’t occur when there is only joint
vidual differences in how often the parents named objects, attention, does joint attention serve a purpose? Chen Yu and
with frequencies ranging from 4.4 to 16.4 naming instances Linda Smith (2016) studied this question by measuring where

144 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

Vocabulary at 12 months
150
when joint attention also occurred, and that longer periods
of joint attention were associated with longer sustained atten-
tion. The message of these results is that when the parent is
demonstrating interest in an object by looking at it, they trans- 100
mit this interest to the infant by doing other things like talk-
ing about the object and touching it, and this encourages the
infant to look longer at the object (Suarez-Rivera et al., 2019). 50
At the beginning of our discussion we stated that in-
fants typically learn with a social partner, usually a parent.
But infants rarely look at the parent’s face during toy play 0
(Figure 6.35), because what’s important to the infant are the 0 1 2 3 4 5
toys. Instead, infants learn an object’s name (1) by following Naming × quantity measure at 9 months
the cue of the parent’s attention, which is indicated by talking Figure 6.36 The relationship between infant vocabulary at 12
about an object and touching it, and (2) by hearing the object’s months and the quality of naming measured in the Yu et al. (2018)
name while their attention is focused on the object. experiment. See text for details.

TEST YOURSELF 6.2

1. Describe Eagly’s experiment that provided evidence for 7. What is the evidence that driving while talking on a
the same-object advantage. smartphone or while texting is a bad idea?
2. Describe Carrasco’s experiment that showed an object’s 8. What is the evidence that high usage of smartphones
appearance can be changed by attention. and the Internet can, under some conditions, have nega-
tive effects on performance?
3. Describe O’Craven’s experiment in which people ob-
served superimposed face and house stimuli. What did 9. Describe the experiment that showed that just having
this experiment indicate about the effect of attention on your smartphone nearby can affect scores on tests of
the responding of specific brain structures? memory and intelligence.
4. Describe Datta and DeYoe’s experiment on how attend- 10. What is spatial neglect? What causes it? Describe the ex-
ing to different locations activates the brain. What is an periment that showed that neglect to stimuli on the left
attention map? What was the point of the “secret place” isn’t due to being blind on the left.
experiment? Compare this experiment to the “mind 11. What is extinction? What does the “spider” experiment
reading” experiments described at the end of Chapter 5. demonstrate about conscious and unconscious atten-
5. Describe Womesdorf and coworkers’ experiment in tional processing?
which they recorded from neurons in a monkey’s tempo- 12. What is the connection between meditation and
ral lobe. How did they show how receptive field location attention?
is affected by attention? 13. Describe how head-mounted eye tracking was used
6. Describe the following two situations that illustrate how by Yu and coworkers (2018) to measure the attention
not attending can result in not perceiving: (1) inatten- of infants and their parents as they were playing with
tional blindness and (2) change detection. toys. What is the conclusion from this research?

THINK ABOUT IT
1. If salience is determined by characteristics of a scene such 3. Can you think of situations from your experience that
as contrast, color, and orientation, why might it be correct are similar to the change detection experiments in that
to say that paying attention to an object can increase its you missed seeing an object that became easy to see
salience? (p. 134) once!you!knew it was there? What do you think was be-
hind your initial failure to see this object? (p. 137)
2. How is the idea of regularities of the environment that we
introduced in Chapter 5 (see page 105) related to the cog- Hint for change detection demonstration on page 138: Pay attention
nitive factors that determine where people look? (p. 131) to the sign near the lower left portion of the picture.

Think About It 145

146 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

EMPICS Sport - EMPICS/Getty Images

Learning Objectives
After studying this chapter, you will be able to …
■ Understand the ecological approach to perception. ■ Understand the physiology behind our ability to understand
■ Describe the information people use to find their way when other people’s actions.
walking and driving. ■ Understand what is behind the idea that the purpose of percep-
■ Understand how the brain’s “GPS” system creates cortical maps tion is to enable us to interact with the environment.
that help animals and people find their way. ■ Understand what it means to say that “prediction is everywhere.”
■ Describe how carrying out simple physical actions depends on ■ Describe what an infant affordance is and how research has
interactions between the sensory and motor components of the studied this phenomenon
nervous system, combined with prediction.

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Pe 6

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CHAPTER 6

124 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

Based on results such as these, Donald Broadbent (1958)

Attention to a Location in Space: + +

METHOD Precueing 275

6.2 The Diversity of Attention Research 125

Figure 6.6 Flow diagram of Treisman's (1988) feature integration

Figure 6.4 Spatial attention can be compared to a spotlight that

DEMONSTRATION Visual Search

126 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

800 What all of these early experiments have in common is

128 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

Figure 6.11 Explanation based on corollary discharge theory for why

in response to the MS and this movement causes an image to move

6.4 Things That Influence

Visual Salience Figure 6.14. An example of attention capture: When participants

a scene and combine these values to create a saliency map of

130 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

(a) Visual scene

their knowledge of what is usually found in the scene.

6.4 Things That Influence Visual Scanning 131

(a) (b) Determine ages of people.

(c) Remember clothing. (d) Remember the positions of

that 45 percent of the observers’ fixations occurred close to

132 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

6.5 The Benefits of Attention 133

Figure 6.20 Procedure for Carrasco and

(a) Fixate (b) Cue flashed (c) Gratings flashed

134 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

A large number of experiments have shown that attention af-

2.5 2.5 Figure 6.21 (a) Superimposed face

activation when the subject attended to

Attended stimulus Attended stimulus

6.6 The Physiology of Attention 135

(see Figure 4.12, page 75), in which presenting objects at differ-

136 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

Trials 1–5 Trial (6)

Figure 6.24 Inattentional blindness experiment. (a) The cross

6.7 What Happens When We Don’t Attend? 137

Smartphone Distractions While Driving

138 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

tention can degrade driving performance. And phones aren’t

Reaction time (ms)

Figure 6.29 City scene showing people

6.8 Distraction by Smartphones 139

distraction from a task impairs performance. It isn’t surpris-

140 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

(a) (b) (c)

6.9 Disorders of Attention: Spatial Neglect and Extinction 141

b (a) Ring on left flower on right

142 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

DEVELOPMENTAL DIMENSION Infant Attention and Learning Object Names

Something to Consider: Focusing Attention by Meditating 143

Courtesy of Chen Yu, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin

face three objects

144 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

TEST YOURSELF 6.2

Think About It 145

146 CHAPTER 6 Visual Attention

EMPICS Sport - EMPICS/Getty Images

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