Attention and Effort

Levels of processing: A framework for memory research

Much effort has been made to understand the role of attention in perception; much less effort has been placed on the role attention plays in the control of action Our goal in this chapter is to account for the role of attention in action, both when performance is automatic and when it is under deliberate conscious control We propose a theoretical framework structured around the notion of a set of active schemas, organized according to the particular action sequences of which they are a part, awaiting the appropriate set of conditions so that they can become selected to control action The analysis is therefore centered around actions, primarily external actions, but the same principles apply to internal actions—actions that involve only the cognitive processing mechanisms One major emphasis in the study of attentional processes is the distinction between controlled and automatic processing of perceptual inputs (eg, Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977) Our work here can be seen as complementary to the distinction between controlled and automatic processes: we examine action rather than perception; we emphasize the situations in which deliberate, conscious control of activity is desired rather than those that are automatic

Attention to action: willed and automatic control of behavior

A parallel distributed processing model of visual word recognition and pronunciation is described. The model consists of sets of orthographic and phonological units and an interlevel of hidden units. Weights on connections between units were modified during a training phase using the back-propagation learning algorithm. The model simulates many aspects of human performance, including (a) differences between words in terms of processing difficulty, (b) pronunciation of novel items, (c) differences between readers in terms of word recognition skill, (d) transitions from beginning to skilled reading, and (e) differences in performance on lexical decision and naming tasks. The model's behavior early in the learning phase corresponds to that of children acquiring word recognition skills. Training with a smaller number of hidden units produces output characteristic of many dyslexic readers. Naming is simulated without pronunciation rules, and lexical decisions are simulated without accessing word-level representations. The performance of the model is largely determined by three factors: the nature of the input, a significant fragment of written English; the learning rule, which encodes the implicit structure of the orthography in the weights on connections; and the architecture of the system, which influences the scope of what can be learned.

A Distributed, Developmental Model of Word Recognition and Naming.

Automatic and effortful processes in memory.

The psychological refractory period (PRP) effect of interference between 2 choice reaction time tasks a t short intertask intervals was eliminated when both of the tasks were ideomotor compatible. The P R P effect was, however, obtained when either or both of these tasks were replaced by stimulus-response compatible tasks that were not ideomotor compatible. I t was concluded that a major source of the P R P effect is a limited capacity mechanism that (a) translates between an encoded stimulus and a response code, and (b) is not needed when a task is ideomotor compatible.

On doing two things at once. II. Elimination of the psychological refractory period effect.

The question of whether or not lexical information is accessed directly from a visual code or by a process of phonetic mediation was investigated in three lexical decision experiments. Phonetic similarity influenced decisions about visually presented words only when they were to be discriminated from orthographically regular nonwords. When consonant strings or random letter strings were used as nonwords, phonetic similarity effects were absent, and graphemic similarity exerted a powerful effect while evidence of semantic priming was found. This pattern was interpreted as evidence of direct lexical access, which is probably the normal processing mode for skilled readers. Phonetic coding, when it occurs, may be a storage strategy rather than a part of the addressing chain for lexical structures.

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Harvey G. Shulman

Papers

On doing two things at once. II. Elimination of the psychological refractory period effect.

The effects of graphemic, phonetic, and semantic relationships on access to lexical structures

Dissociating Brain Responses to Syntactic and Semantic Anomalies: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Similarity effects in short-term memory.

Control properties of semantic coding in a lexical decision task