p.2 Are attention, perception and memory really that important?
p.3 We need to decide whether what we detect is important, and how to respond to it... Apart from being
able to experience the world, we also act on the information it provides.
p.4 Cognitive psychologists are interested in discovering the processes that allow us to perceive and attend
to the world around us as well as explaining how what we have learned is used in making sense of what we find there.
p.4-5 although we can consider attention, perception and memory as identifiable components of the human
cognitive system, for a complete understanding of any of them it is necessary to appreciate the way they interact and depend
on each other.
p.5 There are many varieties of attention, but in most cases it is involved in the selection of a subset
of information for further processing by another part of the information processing system.
p.6 Attentional selection is deemed necessary because the rest of the processing system cannot process all
stimulus inputs or all response outputs simultaneously... The control of attention, either to determine what is to be selected
or how to divide resources or maintain vigilance, also involves attention; in this case, executive attention is involved in
the supervision of selectivity or resource allocation.
p.6 A rather different view of attention is that, rather than an active agent, it is the outcome of processing...
In one influential theory of attention, focal attention is used to bind visual features together into objects.
p.7 Even when we are attending consciously on a task, attention can be captured automatically by a sudden
change in the environment. In this case the control of attention is dictated by unconscious processes.
p.7 Most early stages of perceptual processing are automatic and unconscious... attention may be necessary
for binding together the individual perceptual properties of an object... and for selecting aspects of the environment for
perceptual processes to act on.
p.18 Most cognition involves... interaction between stimuli and stored knowledge, and demonstrates that
the hypothetical stages of attention, perception and memory must be interactive during cognitive activities.
p.23 By combining selected data from the outside world with stored knowledge, the component parts of the
brain work together to produce coherent and purposeful behaviour.
p.30 anything in the physical world that cannot be detected by our sense organs is 'not there' for us...
we are not conscious of them.
p.52 Richard Gregory (1977) says that perception is 'a dynamic searching for the best interpretation of
the available data'.
p.56 the scene... was more likely to become dominant if attention was drawn to it by a cue that attracted
attention to it exogenously [JLJ - by a novel, external stimulus].
p.68 In the next chapter we shall discuss Treisman and Gelade's (1980) proposal that focal attention to
a spatial location is important for binding features together.
p.75 a sudden change in the visual environment will capture attention... once we have noted the
stimulus that captured attention, we can endogenously orient attention back to what we were previously doing.... Posner (1980)
said visual 'attention can be likened to a spotlight that enhances the efficiency of the detection of event within its beam'
p.98 Rensink (2000), in his 'coherence theory', suggests that focused attention is necessary to bind the
sensory features into a coherent object representation and to maintain this representation in visual short-term memory...
when attention is withdrawn from the object it becomes 'unglued' and the sensory features come apart again.
p.169 Eccleston and Crombez... argue that pain captures central processing mechanisms to allow selection
for the action of escaping the pain... Eccleston and Crombez invoke the concept of attention as a 'dynamic mechanism of selection
for action' ... they argue that 'The problem for any model of attention is that it must account for the two potentially contradictory
requirements of an attentional mechanism: "the need for continuity of attentional engagement against the need for interruptibility"
... '
