Transcription
Welcome to the last part of this week's lecture on attention and today, or now, we will speak about automaticity. Okay, so I would like to start this part again with a movie excerpt from The Great Escape from the 1960s. And to give you some context, the movie is about a couple of British prisoners of war who want to escape the Germans from a prisoner camp. And the scene I'm showing you is when they are already out in the normal public and they have forged fake documents showing they are French, and they want to take a bus to get away and possibly get to France or something like that. But they are held up by the German police who check their documents. See what happens in that scene and how that relates to automaticity.
[Music]
Good luck. Thank you.
[Music]
Okay, so what happened here? They were so well prepared to pretend to be to play French people, but the good luck just automatically uh provoked the response of "Thank you" to be a polite person, and that gave them away. So let's have a look at this automaticity. Now, usually there is made the distinction that our mental processes, or mental processing, can be either automatic or controlled. Some people think it's a clear distinction of either-or, and others would think that it's more a gradient between the two. And the two of them have kind of the opposite features when we look at this. So, for instance, controlled processing, the assumption is it requires attention. Like in just one second, it, we have seen in the flicker paradigm and the change paradigm when we can't detect the change automatically without attention, like we would when the blank screen was in between there and just two different images flicker back and forth. Then it's automatic. But otherwise, we need controlled search of point by point. Another assumption is that controlled processing has a limited capacity. So we can usually focus only on one thing. We find it very difficult to divide our attention or to engage in multitasking. For instance, while automatic processing has an unlimited capacity, and that's also one of the big advantages of automatic processing, that it doesn't take away from our limited capacity. Control processing is rather slow, while automatic processing is fast. And along the same lines, controlled is considered to be effortful, while automatic is effortless, which fits to it doesn't need any capacity for mental capacity. Control processing is the processing we are aware of, which is conscious, and automatic processing is usually outside our awareness, like in this movie clip where he just responded with "Thank you" and didn't even realize. Um, the result of automatic process might very well be aware. We might very well be aware, like he did, but the moment of processing, "Should I respond? Yes or no? Yes, let's respond." That is outside of our awareness. And therefore, controlled is thought to be controllable, while automatic is uncontrollable. And controlled processing is flexible, automatic is inflexible. So a typical example to the distinction between the two is also like when you go to work or to uni, the same route every day or something like that. Then this has become second nature. It's pretty automatic. And if you say, "Okay, I want to bring back a library book tomorrow which I have at home already for weeks," and you have to take a little detour because of the automaticity in this process, it's very likely that you forget about this because it's, you know, it's inflexible, it's hard to control, it's outside of our awareness. So these automatic processes are a little bit like autopilot in that respect. However, the advantage is clear. It doesn't rely on capacity. Suppose you would have to do everything with controlled processing, every sip, taking a step, or something like that.
Okay, let's have a look at some examples for yourself. Think about it for a second and think whether walking, would you consider this to be a controlled or an automatic process? Most people would probably say it's an automatic process. We don't have to really pay attention to walking, really. However, if you think about children who learn to walk, or people who had a leg amputated and need to walk again, it's probably controlled. So the action itself doesn't necessarily determine whether it's controlled or automatic. It depends on the person who is performing this action. Another example is driving. Experienced drivers, a lot of the elements, actions we do during driving are automatic, which is a good thing because it allows us to put more resources on the non-automatic aspects of driving, like navigating, reading road signs, detecting hazards, and stuff like that. However, if you think about your driving lessons, if you have a driving license, usually the first one or two lessons, we are sitting in the car, it's like somebody else tells, says something to us, like the instructor's instructor, instructor's like, "Please shut up, I have to concentrate on the driving." Why? When we are experienced, well, we can have a chat next to this. So it's controlled, most likely.
So when we have these two different things, we have controlled and we have automatic activities, then of course the question comes up, how do we get from the controlled to the automatic state? And the answer is simply practice. You have to practice to do that. So you have to do the same action over and over again, and there's no real shortcut to that. But what's the cognitive mechanism behind that? And I would like to present two different explanations. Schneider and Shiffrin, they proposed in the late 1970s that controlled and automatic processing are pretty much based on the same cognitive process. What changes is the efficiency of these processes. So when we practice, it becomes more and more efficient, but it's still the same process. In terms of neural anatomy, you would say it's still the same brain area which does this task or which implements this process, but the brain area becomes more efficient, maybe the wiring changes to be faster in processing. An alternative suggestion was made by Gordon Logan in the late 1980s, and this is called the instance theory of automaticity. And this is basically the opposite suggestion. And that is that we, when we get from controlled to automatic, we actually shift our strategy of how we do the task. Or in other words, it's based on different cognitive processes. It's not the same which gets more efficient, but we change from one way of doing the task to another way. So it's different processes. And in terms of neural anatomy, we would say when we do a task in the controlled mode, it's a different brain area as compared to when we do the task in an automatic mode after some practice.
So they, Gordon Logan proposed that at the unpracticed stage, when we engage in controlled processing, we use a general algorithm to solve problems. And we will go a little bit more detail into that in our lecture later on on problem solving. And when we have the task practiced, then what we basically do is we store the solution to the task in our memory, and we just, in an automatic fashion, can retrieve the solution from our memory without having to think about this. Let's have a look at an example which illustrates that nicely. Suppose you learn multiplication, you know, as a child in school. And you're the first time you are faced with the challenge of finding out the answer to the multiplication five times four. And as a child, you would just sum up the five four times. So you'd say five plus five is ten, plus five is fifteen, plus five is twenty. So the answer is twenty. This is a controlled process. It's slow, it's effortful, we are aware of it, it takes up our resources, we can't do much stuff other than that. However, if our teachers and parents made us learn our timetables, times tables very well, and by practice, we have just learned five times four is twenty. It's something we have stored in our memory. And when we are now faced the problem, we can just retrieve the solution immediately and automatically without expanding any resources, and it's fast and effortless. So that's the idea of the instance theory of automaticity, that we go over from one stage to the other.
Okay, I don't want to go into too much detail in this area of automaticity. I just wanted to propose and show you these two models and how it can be explained. I just, at the end now, I would like to raise your awareness that automaticity actually bears quite a few dangers. And this is that this idea of autopilot. And for instance, in traffic, in the UK in particular, at places where you have a lot of tourists, you have these writings on the street, on the roads, at pedestrian crossings, where to look. Because in the UK, you have the traffic on the left side of the road, as opposed to many other countries where you drive on the right side of the road. And so people naturally automatically look in the wrong direction. So they may look to the left, actually, and miss the cars coming from the right, which of course is extremely dangerous, as you probably already have figured out by my accent. Anyway, I am German, and so I was used to driving on the right side of the road. And when I moved to England, I had to learn how to drive on the left side of the road. And I could really nicely see this transition from extremely controlled processing. You know, you drive, the first time we came over by car, using the ferry, and you drive from the ferry, and you think like, "Oh my god, oh my god, what am I doing?" And then you get used to it. And then I realized that somewhere in the middle, after a while of driving in the UK, driving on the left side of the road started to become automatic. And that was actually a very dangerous phase, as I realized later, because it became automatic, but my mind sometimes shows the automatic routines from driving in Germany on the right side of the road. In the beginning, it's fully controlled, so I made, I didn't make many mistakes. But then it became automatic. So most of the time, I would start to look left, sorry, look right automatically. But occasionally, because we are starting to run on autopilot, I would still look left. But because it's automatic behavior, I wouldn't realize that I made a mistake. And that once or twice actually resulted in not horribly dangerous situations, but in situations which made me wary of, "Okay, I really need to pay more attention here." But that's, that's challenging. Another typical example often raised in the US is this highway hypnosis, where you have these endless straight roads where not much is happening. So you get in this state where you don't pay attention at all to driving. So because driving is automatic, you can drive such a road technically like with your eyes closed and don't pay any attention at all. And then after an hour or two, you make a break, and you suddenly think, "How did I even get here? I just did one or two hours of driving. How did that happen?" But that mode of driving is of course dangerous because you're in such a strong autopilot, an automatic driving mode, that you can very poorly respond to challenges, dangers, hazards, and stuff like that. So that should be avoided by all costs. And you need to make more breaks then, or turn up the music, open the window, when you see you get into this hypnosis state, talk to your neighbor, to your passenger, or something like that. And if you realize you get into that, definitely do something about it.
Okay, to summarize the automaticity bit. Automatic processing is effortless, fast, and outside of our awareness. And that's its big strength. It so much reduces the demands on our cognitive control of attention. I already said that in the beginning. Suppose every little action, including stuff like speaking, like drinking, walking, you would always have to pay the same amount of attention as you only know from controlled attention, like writing a letter or doing some file manipulations or things like that. But on the other hand, the disadvantage is the inflexibility. And this is just, you know, two sides of the same coin. For a program or an action to be automatic, it has to be a fixed program per definition. Otherwise, it can't be automatic. If we would have to process all conceivable parameters, everything, we would need more processing, and it couldn't be automatic anymore. So the best thing for everyday life is to just be very aware of this distinction of controlled and automatic processing. And wherever you may work later on in life, be aware that people try to move, just by the very nature of us, to automatic actions because it reduces the demands and leaves the demands for the, let's say, more important things in our everyday life. Okay, so and we have seen that automaticity can be established by practice. If you have any questions, please post them in the BBL discussion boards. And next week, we will talk about short-term memory. Thank you very much for listening to this lecture and hopefully see you soon. Bye.