Attention and mental resources

Attention and mental resources

        Attention : the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things . attention has also been referred to as allocation of processing resources .

Attentional resources are defined along three dichotomous dimensions :

        1. Stages of processing with perceptual / central processing requiring resources different from those used for response processing

        2. Processing codes with spatial processing requiring resources different from those used for verbal processing , and

        3. Input / output modalities with visual and auditory processing requiring different processing resources .  

        Product refers to the stage of awareness with respect to the various perceptual and cognitive activities involved in constructing , updating , and revising the state of awareness .

First activity is dichotic testing – josie`s science experiment

        First time , listening to the left earphone , and write down the words you heard , second time , change to the right ear , finally put on the both side of earphone and listening , write down the words you heard .

        The result for me is left side is more similar the both side , so my right side of brain is more advanced than the left side , because the right side of brain control the left side of body and left side of brain control right side of brain . in the test , most of classmates left side of brain is more strong . for the both side of listening I think this is about selective attention of the brain ,so I just select out the word more sensitive .

        Selective attention  ( filter out in visual and audio ) : focusing on specific objects and filtering out others , the ability to attend to one source of information while ignore or excluding ongoing message around us .

        Expectancy – the use if our knowledge to predict where to look for information and what changes to expect of product/system behavior .

        Selective attention salience – the features of the environment that will attract or ‘ capture ‘ attention

second activity is dichotic testing two

        The left side of ear is a woman reading words with low speed , and the right side of ear is reading a article with high speed . we should write down the word start with m , p or t .

        The result said we can`t keep attention to the different things with same organum sensuum , so we can`t using the same resources to do multitasks at the same time .

        Multiple resources theory : focusing on specific objects  and filtering out others . the ability to attend to one source of information while ignore or excluding ongoing message around us .

        Divided attention  ( multitasks ): paying attention to more than one thing at one time . this ability is limited , which has an impact on how much we can process at once .

        The coordinating of multiple tasks ( including the allocation of limited processing resources ) , planning , chunking or the reorganizing of information to increase the amount of irrelevant information have all been labeled as part of the executive control .

last activity is eye tracking

       We use the advanced instrument to catch the pupil , tracking the eye which part the tester focus , then record the data .

       From this testing , attentional resources are directed to one single task and maintained until desired goal is achieved , it`s called “ focus attention “ . Focus attention have the effort and difficulty to the performance . if the effort is more than difficulty , so the performance improved .

       A reduced level of resource requirement by one task would translate to increased spare resources for processing other tasks .