Switching or gating? The attentional challenge in cognitive models of psychological time
Introduction
Over the decades, the definition of attention has depended on the mentalistic or scientific orientation of psychologists (James, 1890). Its selective aspects (focusing on certain features to the exclusion of others) have been recognized for a long time, and its usefulness in explaining why an organism does not always produce the same response when it faces the same set of stimuli in a constant environment is in no doubt. However, the allocation of attentional resources between concurrent tasks or the involvement of attention in the preparation of motor processes have been analyzed more recently. Overall, attention may be conceived as a cognitive process bridging the gap between the flow of incoming stimuli and the response of an organism. The main theoretical families of ideas dealing with attentional processes in general will be briefly outlined below, before their influence on the cognitive models of psychological time is discussed. Some experimental strategies designed to investigate these different approaches will be described, in particular those that are adapted to the study of the relationship between attention and subjective duration in animal and human subjects.
Section snippets
Attentional processes: filtering or resource allocation
Theories dealing with attentional processing can be classified as `filter' or `capacity' theories. The former concern focused attention and the selection of to be processed stimuli (they are also called `bottleneck' or `single channel' theories (Broadbent, 1958)). The latter deal with attentional processing limitations, i.e. attention allocation (Kahnemann, 1973). As the flow of incoming information is much too large to be processed as a whole some selection must take place to discard
Psychological time: with or without a timer?
Most time estimation data obtained from human subjects have been interpreted within two main theoretical frameworks: memory- and attention-based models. Only one of these approaches takes attentional processes into account. According to the pioneering work of Ornstein (1969)and his `storage-size' model, subjective duration is a by-product of nontemporal information processing and derives from the quantity and complexity of information stored in the memory. Events taking less `space' are
Animal timing: temporal information processing
Data collected in humans with the dual-task paradigm can thus be explained on the basis of attentional tradeoff between a timer and a stimulus processor. However, the role of attention within models accounting for animal timing performance seemed to be less clear, although, during the 1960s and 1970s Staddon (1965), Staddon (1967, 1974)repeatedly suggested that the accuracy of timing performance directly depended upon the capacity to focus attention on the crucial temporal parameters of the
The attentional gate model
More recently, the attentional gate model (AGM) proposed a `merger' between scalar timing properties and cognitive factors such as attention (Zakay and Block, 1995Zakay and Block, 1996Zakay and Block, 1997Zakay and Block, 1998Block and Zakay, 1996). By suggesting that the same theoretical framework might be common to all species, it addressed a question of fundamental importance both for attention and timing concepts. According to Block and Zakay (1996)(p. 182), the AGM combines features of
TIP and attention
The TIP model clearly specifies that the closure of the switch (Zakay and Block use the term `opening' for the equivalent operation) is triggered by incoming significant temporal information and can be modulated by attention and stimulus factors (for instance, its modality). Even if the TIP model, which was developed within the context of animal timing, does not consider the attentional mechanism as a fully fledged component, it never disputed the idea that attention may be divided between
Conclusions
Attentional phenomena in time discrimination have been interpreted in relation to existing theories of attentional processing. The data reflected both the selective and capacity aspects of attentional processing and confirmed again that, in spite of the absence of specific receptor channels, duration is a type of information in its own right. It also seems that several attentional effects described in animals and humans can be readily interpreted within the framework of the TIP and scalar
Acknowledgements
The author is indebted to Dr Françoise Macar for insightful comments on a previous version of the manuscript, and to Dr John Wearden for improving the language.
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