Brain games pay attention answers

The assignment is to choose only two of my classmate's post and reply to their post. One paragraph or two is enough for each of my classmates. Because it is like a discussion post try to be informal and use words like ( I like your points on..., I found your post really interesting, you have a good point..., when I read your post I..., I believe that ....) something like that (using the "I" word)

The rubric

For the Response Posts you will be graded as follows:

Points Awarded

0

1-­‐2

3-­‐4

Criteria

You did not complete any response posts, or your response Posts did not contribute to the discussion question.

You only completed one response post and/or your responses did not contribute to the discussion in a significant way.

Your responses advanced the conversation in a meaningful way, and provided a helpful and unique perspective on the discussion topic.

The question was:

The video will review many of the concepts discussed in your book (e.g., the spotlight metaphor of attention, change blindness, divided attention, etc). You will also have the oppotunity to engage in attention games! After watching the video, please post your thoughts/reactions to the games and link them to the principles/concepts discussed in your book and in the video.

The videos

· Brain Games - Pay Attention https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1zwwx4

· Test Your Awareness: Do the test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4

Your answer was:

I sat down to watch the two videos prepared to catch every little detail by closely paying attention. I hoped to prove scientists wrong. Even after it was clearly stated that there would be tricks and destructions throughout, I still fell for most of them and ended up amazed. Scenes such as that of Apollo at the warehouse and while picking pockets, for instance, clarified for me how we pay attention to what is important and often not to what isn’t (spotlight metaphor of attention). Even after watching Brain Games - Pay Attention, I went ahead and counted the number of passes the white team made in Test Your Awareness, I was relieved to find out I had counted correctly but immediately got furious that I had missed the moonwalking bear. Being asked to focus on an aspect with the intention of making me unaware of other occurrences left me feeling quite cheated, but has driven the concepts home nonetheless. It really is easy to miss something you are not looking for! I still can’t believe I was not able to catch the switch in Brain Games - Pay Attention, especially due to the change in the color of the shirt when the man went under for a pen (change blindness).

The concept associated with foveation that perception of the world being largely due to unconscious construction and filling in on the basis of inference to supplement the inadequate input of the eyes has also been supported by the scene in Brain Games - Pay Attention, where it was possible to read the entire sentence with all the letters out of place just after I happened to have missed the bunny, the gorilla and the bear in the previous scene, this confirms the positioning of my eyeballs in a way that limited the field of vision to what Apollo was doing thus filtering out the other details resulting in inattention blindness. I am delighted by the way the two videos have imposed on me an in-depth understanding of the not so easy to perceive concepts.

The classmate's answers:

Mary’s answer:

brain games in this week’s video demonstrated that it is difficult, if not impossible, to process more than one thing at a time. It’s interesting and a bit frightening to learn how much we are oblivious to in our environment and how influential our perceptions can be with regard to the attended or unattended data that we process.

The Jabawockee game demonstrated inattentional blindness, the process by which we fail to see things that are right in front of us. The game supports the theory that attention is required to see and process stimuli. The penguin in the background was considered (by my brain at least) to be a distraction to the stimuli that I was supposed to be focusing on, therefore, it was filtered out.

With his understanding of how minds work, Apollo is able to create illusions and distract audiences effectively. Knowing that most minds can only focus on one thing at a time, he distracts by asking questions, which requires use of the attended channel and resources to process. While asking questions (requiring top-down attention), his hands are moving, constantly disrupting our visual (spotlight) attention. He grabs our attention with one hand, to show us something, (requiring bottom-up attention), while the other hand steals an item off of the person, who missed it because it was out of his perception of expectation. Our brains focus on the perceived priority, and in this case, there were too many things to focus on to pick a priority.

The Copperfield and Magic game was a great example of how difficult it is to effectively multi-task, especially unpracticed tasks with measureable outcomes. Petrus Venter reinforces this as he attempts to navigate obstacles with his car while having to focus on an unfamiliar conversation. He perceives his ability to simultaneously drive and conduct business on the cell phone as exceptional under normal circumstances, but when both tasks required additional resources because they were unfamiliar, he found it to be challenging.

Change blindness was demonstrated in games 1, 2 and 3. In all 3 games, some aspect of the scene changed. I didn’t catch any of the changes, due to either selection or priming (Reisberg, 158). The selection proposal suggests that the changes were perceived and then forgotten, or they weren’t seen at all. Priming suggests that the expectation of stimuli will prepare the appropriate detectors, allowing for recognition.

Jessica’s answer:

This video had my attention right from the get-go! The first trick had me really confused. I found myself rewinding multiple times to try and figure out exactly was happening. I picked a card and then it was gone, so I rewound and picked another and then it was also gone, I was so confused! I then continued to watch the video. By the next trick, I was once again bewildered. The fact that so much can be changing around us and we might not even notice it. This is due to inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness is when people fail to see a prominent stimulus even though they are staring at it. We focus so much on one object and then miss the stimulus. In the video, he was counting his money all well the back round was changing. His hat also changed, the table was changed into a stool and his handkerchief changed. Our brains were completely focused on the money we missed all of these things in the back. I think that inattentional blindness is a very interesting subject because it is something that happens every day. I find it very interesting because this is something I see every time I am on the ice for hockey. I focus only on the puck as I am a goalie and I miss everything else. I don't see someone fall, or the parent dancing in the stands I just see the puck. I had always wondered how I was able to do this. Inattentional blindness can actually be very dangerous. When you are doing something like driving you to focus so much on the road and the task of driving that you could easily miss the person/animal that just jumped in front of you.

We also see change blindness when the man is counting his money. As we see him with a background counting his money, the camera zooms in on his hands and then zooms back out to him and the background is different. I didn't notice at first but when I rewound the video I noticed that the background had actually changed. We just didn't notice because we had been focused on the money while it zoomed in it more.

I enjoyed how at the end of the video it wrapped up by saying that we miss these things because of our full attention to what was important. I often feel as though when I am focused on something I am going to miss something but I guess that is right in that the brain knows what is important and will focus on that.

Ivor’s answer:

This “Brain Games” episode was primarily focused on attention. Attention, simply said, is what we focus on, and in the episode, we were provided with 11 games that were designed to “play” with our attention and later show us what we have missed. Throughout the episode, we were presented with many concepts that explain the reasoning to our “failure” and the main ones include: change blindness, divided attention, inattentional blindness, Stroop Effect, etc.

Let’s start with change blindness, which is the failure to notice a surprisingly large change from one moment to the next. This was shown in the first few tricks in which the background change or a man at the counter changed for example. This happens mostly because we're able to pay attention to one thing at a time and if we were focusing on Apollo while he was performing his trick, we didn’t stand much chance in noticing the background change. Furthermore, it was argued that we can notice a change on the object/image that is captivating our attention, but we simply can’t do the same for background objects/images. This is related to the spotlight metaphor that was mentioned, in which attention is described as a spotlight – if it widens it becomes harder to “catch” all that’s going on.

Divided attention is defined as the skill to perform multiple tasks simultaneously, or as we would often call it, multitasking. This also seems to be a “hoax” since like said we are wired to be able to pay attention to a single thing at once, so actually, the phrase divided attention makes more sense than multitasking – when we “multitask” we’re actually only shifting our attention from one thing onto the next… This was seen in the episode when Petrus was performing driving “multitask” and he failed. Like noted, there are people better at this and we call them supertaskers, but those people are rare, and they also don’t have the full capability of actively paying attention to many things at once. We perform this switching of attention using our prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe.

Inattentional blindness is focusing on one thing and failing to “catch” other things. This was seen when Apollo was showing us how to defend from theft, we missed quite a few things pass by since we were focused on Apollo. This concept is related to change blindness, but unlike change blindness, inattentional blindness can apply to more than change – like people passing by, missing cyclists on the road, etc. This happens mostly because our brain doesn’t expect these things and when they happen it’s often too late.

Also, there was mentioning of Stroop Effect, which in this case was focused on naming the color of the text, while the meaning of the text was also color (often not matching). This proves hard since due to automaticity we can’t help to notice the meaning of the word – making our reaction time slower.

Finally, their answer to the Stroop Effect problem and generally the issue of taking control of the automatic filtering was hypnosis. Hypnosis is the induction of a state of consciousness in which a person apparently loses the power of voluntary action and is highly responsive to suggestion or direction. It is noted that with hypnosis we can “shut-off” certain stimuli and focus on what we really want. Although this is still a really questionable topic, it could possibly work.

Sarah’s answer:

This video was very interesting to me and a strong visual representation of the topics covered in the readings from this week. One of the examples that stood out to me the most was the example of multitasking. This is shown in the video by the man talking on the phone while driving, which (along with texting) is a main concern in today's world of traffic. Multitasking is an example of divided attention. For successful multitasking, the tasks being performed need to have separate resources available for use. As shown in the video, and discussed in the textbook, talking on the phone and driving do not seem like they would have similar resources, but they do. This is shown in the video by the slightly uncontrolled driving and his inability to concentrate on the conversation/questions being asked. Having a passenger in the car is not the same as having a conversation on the phone because the passenger is also aware of the drivers surrounding environment and can adjust the level of conversation as necessary.

The other examples that I found interesting to watch and participate in were the ones demonstrating change blindness. Change blindness is the sense that an observer has the inability to see changes in the environment even when they are looking directly at the changing scene. This was shown in the example of the man changing $1 to $100 with the background objects changing, the man changing shirts without the individuals noticing even though they are in the middle of conversation, and the pictures that were presented to us, the audience, with changes taking place. It was very surprising to me that even when I was warned that things were going to change (even given the number of changes that were about to occur) I was still unable to detect all of the changes.

The last noticeable topic that stood out to me what the inattentional blindness. This was shown in the demonstration towards the end where the audience was instructed to count the number of times that that blue Jabbawockeez entered the spotlight, but what the audience did not see what the penguin that was also present. Everyone was staring directly at the stage, that the penguin walked across, but failed to see the penguin at all. I myself did not see the penguin as I was more focused on counting the amount of times the spotlight was entered.

I think the video was a very good example of the current attention topics. I myself did not notice most of the changes in the several different environments, but seeing all of the explanations pan out was very interesting!

Burkard’s answer:

Before watching this video I had some examples in my head of when my focus of attention was strictly limited but it was either under stress or there were many factors coming into play. After watching this video, it was emphasized that one’s attention is extremely limited during all circumstances of our day-to-day lives. One of the major examples that sparked my interest was the divided attention. This included multitasking, which I thought I knew it meant when someone was doing multiple tasks at one time. I believe most people think the same thing. The interactions throughout the examples in the video proved to us that most people (98%) can only do one task at a time and you may be switching back and forth through each task when you’re busy. During one of the games we were watching a video of driving and we needed to keep track of how many times the speaker said magic and how many times we saw a specific name/person on the screen. I was able to get the amount of times the person said magic but I could not tell you how many times I saw his name on the video. This goes to show that when you have two tasks going on you’re able to focus on one task but might not effectively focus on the other. This is what happens with multitasking. Another factor that correlates with that is intattentional blindness. Here you’re perception involves a lot of activity, as you interpret the incoming information. One large example in our day-to-day lives is texting/talking while driving. I’ve 100% noticed this for myself, as much as I don’t like to admit it but I use my phone while driving. It’s proved that you are doing one task at a time and that one task will be more efficient so that leaves the other task to be less efficient. When you’re on the phone your taking part in the conversation but you may not realize your driving skills are weaker and potentially dangerous. Overall this video was very informative and eye opening. I do believe after understanding these key concepts that I can be more aware or even notice myself using selective attention.