What do we pay attention to

The blare of a car horn from the street outside, the chatter of your friends, the click of the keys as you type a paper for school, the hum of the heater as it keeps your room warm on a brisk autumn day. But in most cases, we don't pay attention to each and every one of these sensory experiences. Instead, we center our attention on certain important elements of our environment while other things blend into the background or pass us by completely unnoticed. So how exactly do we decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore?

Imagine that you are at a party for a friend hosted at a bustling restaurant. Multiple conversations, the clinking of plates and forks, and many other sounds compete for your attention. Out of all these noises, you find yourself able to tune out the irrelevant sounds and focus on the amusing story that your dining partner shares. How do you manage to ignore certain stimuli and concentrate on just one aspect of your environment?

This is an example of selective attention. Because our ability to attend to the things around us is limited in terms of both capacity and duration, we have to be picky about the things we pay attention to. Attention acts somewhat like a spotlight, highlighting the details that we need to focus on and casting irrelevant information to the sidelines of our perception.

This is because attention is a resource that needs to be distributed to those events that are important. There are two major models describing how visual attention works. Some of the best-known experiments on auditory attention are those performed by psychologist Colin Cherry. Cherry investigated how people are able to track certain conversations while tuning others out, a phenomenon he referred to as the "cocktail party" effect. In these experiments, two auditory messages were presented simultaneously with one presented to each ear.

Cherry then asked participants to pay attention to a particular message, and then repeat back what they had heard. He discovered that the participants were able to easily pay attention to one message and repeat it, but when they were asked about the contents of the other message, they were unable to say anything about it. Cherry found that when contents of the unattended message were suddenly switched such as changing from English to German mid-message or suddenly playing backward very few of the participants even noticed.

Interestingly, if the speaker of the unattended message switched from male to female or vice versa or if the message was swapped with a Hz tone, the participants always noticed the change.

Cherry's findings have been demonstrated in additional experiments. Other researchers have obtained similar results with messages including lists of words and musical melodies. Theories of selective attention tend to focus on when stimulus information is attended to, either early in the process or late.

One of the earliest theories of attention was Donald Broadbent's filter model. Building on the research conducted by Cherry, Broadbent used an information-processing metaphor to describe human attention. He suggested that our capacity to process information is limited in terms of capacity, and our selection of information to process takes place early on in the perceptual process. In order to do this, we utilize a filter to determine which information to attend to. All stimuli are first processed based upon physical properties that include color, loudness, direction, and pitch.

Our selective filters then allow for certain stimuli to pass through for further processing while other stimuli are rejected. Treisman suggested that while Broadbent's basic approach was correct, it failed to account for the fact that people can still process the meaning of attended messages. Treisman proposed that instead of a filter, attention works by utilizing an attenuator that identifies a stimulus based on physical properties or by meaning.

Think of the attenuator like a volume control—you can turn down the volume of other sources of information in order to attend to a single source of information.

The "volume" or intensity of those other stimuli might be low, but they are still present. In experiments, Treisman demonstrated that participants were still able to identify the contents of an unattended message, indicating that they were able to process the meaning of both the attended and unattended messages. Other researchers also believed that Broadbent's model was insufficient and that attention was not based solely on a stimulus's physical properties. The cocktail party effect serves as a prime example.

Imagine that you are at a party and paying attention to the conversation among your group of friends. Suddenly, you hear your name mentioned by a group of people nearby. Even though you were not attending to that conversation, a previously unattended stimulus immediately grabbed your attention based on meaning rather than physical properties. According to the memory selection theory of attention, both attended and unattended messages pass through the initial filter and are then sorted at a second-stage based upon the actual meaning of the message's contents.

Very quickly, the idea of learning to pay attention spread like wildfire in the field of artificial intelligence. When describing the Frisbee, the network concentrates all its resources on the corresponding pixels of the image and temporarily removes all those which correspond to the person and the park—it will return to them later.

Nowadays, any sophisticated artificial intelligence system no longer connects all inputs with all outputs—it knows that learning will be faster if such a plain network, where every pixel of the input has a chance to predict any word at the output, is replaced by an organized architecture where learning is broken down into two modules: one that learns to pay attention, and another that learns to name the data filtered by the first.

Attention is essential, but it may result in a problem: if attention is misdirected, learning can get stuck. Information about it is discarded early on, and it remains confined to the earliest sensory areas. Unattended objects cause only a modest activation that induces little or no learning. This is utterly different from the extraordinary amplification that occurs in our brain whenever we pay attention to an object and become aware of it.

With conscious attention, the discharges of the sensory and conceptual neurons that code for an object are massively amplified and prolonged, and their messages propagate into the prefrontal cortex, where whole populations of neurons ignite and fire for a long time, well beyond the original duration of the image.

As a result, that word has a much better chance of being remembered. This is why every student should learn to pay attention—and also why teachers should pay more attention to attention! Attention plays such a fundamental role in the selection of relevant information that it is present in many different circuits in the brain.

American psychologist Michael Posner distinguishes at least three major attention systems:. Alerting, which indicates when to attend, and adapts our level of vigilance. Orienting, which signals what to attend to, and amplifies any object of interest. Executive attention, which decides how to process the attended information, selects the processes that are relevant to a given task, and controls their execution. These systems massively modulate brain activity and can therefore facilitate learning, but also point it in the wrong direction.

Let us examine them one by one. The first attention system, perhaps the oldest in evolution, tells us when to be on the watch. It sends warning signals that mobilize the entire body when circumstances require it. When a predator approaches or when a strong emotion overwhelms us, a whole series of subcortical nuclei immediately increases the wakefulness and vigilance of the cortex.

This system dictates a massive and diffuse release of neuromodulators such as serotonin, acetylcholine, and dopamine. Through long-range axons with many spread-out branches, these alerting messages reach virtually the entire cortex, greatly modulating cortical activity and learning.

Animal experiments show that the firing of this warning system can indeed radically alter cortical maps. The American neurophysiologist Michael Merzenich conducted several experiments in which the alerting system of mice was tricked into action by electrical stimulation of their subcortical dopamine or acetylcholine circuits. The outcome was a massive shift in cortical maps.

All the neurons that happened to be activated at that moment, even if they had no objective importance, were subject to intense amplification. As a result, the whole auditory map was invaded by this arbitrary note. The mouse became better and better at discriminating sounds close to this sensitive note, but it partially lost the ability to represent other frequencies. It is remarkable that such cortical plasticity, induced by tampering with the alerting system, can occur even in adult animals.

Analysis of the circuits involved shows that neuromodulators such as serotonin and acetylcholine—particularly via the nicotinic receptor sensitive to nicotine, another major player in arousal and alertness —modulate the firing of cortical inhibitory interneurons, tipping the balance between excitation and inhibition. Remember that inhibition plays a key role in the closing of sensitive periods for synaptic plasticity.

Disinhibited by the alerting signals, cortical circuits seem to recover some of their juvenile plasticity, thus reopening the sensitive period for signals that the mouse brain labels as crucial. What about Homo sapiens? It is tempting to think that a similar reorganization of cortical maps occurs every time a composer or a mathematician passionately dives into their chosen field, especially when their passion starts at an early age. A Mozart or a Ramanujan is perhaps so electrified by fervor that his brain maps become literally invaded with mental models of music or math.

Furthermore, this may apply not only to geniuses, but to anyone passionate in their work, from a manual worker to a rocket scientist. By allowing cortical maps to massively reshape themselves, passion breeds talent. Even though not everyone is a Mozart, the same brain circuits of alertness and motivation are present in all people. What circumstances of daily life would mobilize these circuits?

Do they activate only in response to trauma or strong emotions? Maybe not. Some research suggests that video games, especially action games that play with life and death, provide a particularly effective means of engaging our attentional mechanisms. Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships.

And there is no one better to learn from than Sherlock Holmes. At the end of a discussion of attention and decision-making, Kahneman remarks on research that suggests older people connect more with the experiencing self, which is inclined to pay rapt attention to little everyday delights, like sunbeams dancing on water or music drifting through a window.

If a snowstorm prevents a trip to the store for groceries, one person curses the weather and has a rotten day, while another quickly focuses on what a good thing it is to be snug inside and to have that nice leftover meatloaf.

Research on the so-called cognitive appraisal of emotions, pioneered by the psychologists Magda Arnold and Richard Lazarus, confirms that what happens to you, from a blizzard to a pregnancy to a job transfer, is less important to your well-being than how you respond to it.

Then you direct your attention to some element of the situation that frames things in a more helpful light. Interestingly, people who are depressed and anhedonic—unable to feel pleasure—have particular trouble using this venerable attentional self-help tactic. How you react to life is more important than what happens.