Automatic Processes in Attention

Sensation refers to the process that the sense organs perform when they encode physical energy from the environment. The physical stimulus energy is broken down into action potentials in the brain through the process of transduction. Perception, the interpretation of this transformed physical energy/stimuli into meaningful information, occurs in the brain. While sensation is a purely physical phenomenon occurring within the confines of a particular sensual modality and its associated neural registers, the process of perception is an interactive one where previous experiences, knowledge, expectations, etc.

that are multi-modal interact with the physical sensations from the environment in order to produce current our experience. The mechanisms of these perceptions can either be unconscious (occur below the level of conscious awareness) or conscious (occur at the level of conscious awareness). These processes can also be automatic, occurring without conscious effort and conscious control and therefore use very little cognitive resources or in specific instances they can take the form of controlled processes.

Controlled cognitive processes occur with conscious effort and control and use quite a bit of cognitive resources placing a demand on the system (compared to automatic processes). Attention refers to the complex process of sensation and perception whereby we allocate our cognitive resources to particular aspects of the environment. An issue at hand is that we are bombarded every instant by countless physical stimuli from the environment. It would literally be impossible to process all of the information/stimulation occurring in any environmental context.

There must be some mechanism by which stimulation is filtered out so that only the relevant information is processed and perceived. Moreover, cognitive resources are finite and subject to the demand limitations of the brain. People certainly are able to exert conscious control over where they focus their attention (selective attention); however, the process of attention is largely an automatic one and even when one is selectively attending to something the underlying processes that allow a person to consciously direct their attention are largely automatic.

First, the limited capacity of the brain to process information indicates that information that will be attended to must automatically be filtered out from the nearly limitless stimuli in the environment. The process of filtering out much of this incoming information is a bottom-up process occurring in the brain over which we have little control. The process of filtering out incoming information and choosing what information is relevant and what information is not relevant probably includes interactions within the brain with stored representations, schemas, scripts, etc.

such that in a given context information/stimulation deemed the irrelevant to that context is automatically disregarded. As an example, think of how inefficient it would be if a person had to consciously try to observe multiple aspects of their environment and make a conscious decision as to which stimuli/aspects of the environment are relevant to the giving context in which are not. For instance, take a simple task like eating one's lunch in the cafeteria.

It would be quite inefficient if one had to observe every aspect of the environment including the food on the plate, the table, chairs, people, other people's food, windows, lights, floor, silverware, etc. And decide which of these are relevant to the task at hand and which are not.

Then in order to actually eat one would need to decide which hand to use, where to target it in order to pick up one's fork, the right amount of pressure needed to hold fork, aim the exact carrot one wishes to eat ignoring all other stimuli, stab, etc. The process of eating, which is primarily an automatic one, goes smoothly because we are automatically able to filter out irrelevant "noise" focus on the relevant environmental stimuli and simply eat.

Likewise, if one subscribes to bottlenecks theories of attention where a good deal of the environmental energy that we are exposed to must be pared down due to the limited cognitive capacity of the central nervous system, one must assume that this process is an automatic one as it would be impossible to use a controlled process to select and eliminate irrelevant information as a means of conserving limited resources.

The strength of highly automatic processes like attention is their efficiency in terms of preserving limited resources and performing the task at hand smoothly. The notion of the visual spotlight (visual focused attention) as explained the text also highlights the need for the process of attention to be largely automatic. The visual spotlight is that small area of visual focus in the visual field where our attention is keenest. We can control where we direct the visual spotlight; however, often this is automatic process as well.

When one attempts to broaden the visual spotlight, which is a very restricted area visual attentional focus, one can feel the drain on one's cognitive resources as well as the lack of clarity that occurs as one attempts to broaden the spotlight. The attempt to broaden the visual spotlight is conscious and motivational; however, the more one attempts to consciously control the focus of one's attention the more resources are used in the less efficient the process becomes.

If one were to attempt to broaden the visual spotlight at every waking moment one would be exhausted and would likely encounter several mishaps such as accidents like tripping over items, missing important information in the environment, etc. Automatic processes are designed to be efficient, fast, and energy-saving; therefore, these types of processes predominate in the function of one's everyday activities including attention.

Even processes that are considered to be controlled processes such as the tunneling of one's attention or focusing on a specific region are largely an automatic one even though one consciously picks the specific region the focus on. This narrow focus is a result of conscious motivation; however, the cognitive processes that involved in focusing and filtering out information are largely automatic ones driven by this motivation.

Stimulus induced attentional shifts work in the opposite manner such that the stimuli produce an automatic response that shifts over to a controlled selected one. Studies using dual tasks or involving competing automatic and controlled processes such as the Stroop indicate the predominance of automatic attentional processes over controlled ones. For instance, the Stroop task classically has three components: a reading task where the participant quickly reads a list of color names (the words red, green, or.