I wonder if the distinction between urgency and importance is useful
if taking a sort of evolutionery perspective? by this, I mean
that,if we are looking for some simple physical features that tend
to encourage attention, might these be causal features, and if so,
are they reducible to signal features?
I'm thinking of items like "auditory looming" (which I think of as
part of the general class of "comingness"), which may signify call
to action.
I wonder if perception has been shaped by "urgency". Important items
- like understanding the shape of the place in which one is, mapping
escape routes, food etc, can be perceived 'in between' urgent items.
In this way, planning (for escape or feeding) can reduce the number
of urgent items.
So much of auditory spatial perception in real environments can be
'background', requiring little or no attention. An example might be
the reverberant characteristics of a room. Very few people bother to
pay explicit attentino to this, yet most learn to 'use' a room, so
that the perception of direction of sources in a given room improves
over time (Barbara Shinn Cunningham, and others)
So timeliness of response might be facilitated by inattentive,
unconscious or preconscious processes that just run in the
background, building up a background cognitive context that matches
the ongoing causal context well enough for survival. In the absence
of this, a sudden noise in our ear makes us jump whereas the same
noise, albeit unanticipated, would provoke a different response if
it occurred 20 metres away. The question is, what key signal
features differ in those two cases? Can these be cartoonified, and
is that what perception does (especially in urgent cases)?
regards
ppl
Dr. Peter Lennox
S.P.A.R.G.
Signal Processing Applications Research Group
University of Derby
http://sparg.derby.ac.uk
Int. tel: 1775
Diana Deutsch <ddeutsch@xxxxxxxx> 03/05/2006 20:30 >>>
Dear Dan, John et al.,
To place this discussion in historical perspective, the 'late
selection' model of attention was first proposed by Deutsch, J.A. and
Deutsch, D.,'Attention: Some theoretical considerations',
Psychological Review, 1963, 70, 80-90. There have, of course, been a
large number of elaborations of this basic model. The article is
attached.
Cheers,
Diana Deutsch
--
Professor Diana Deutsch
Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr. #0109
La Jolla, CA 92093-0109, USA
858-453-1558 (tel)
858-453-4763 (fax)
http://www-psy.ucsd.edu/~ddeutsch
http://www.philomel.com
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