Cognition: Memory, Attention, and Learning - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 135

Fig. 5.5 A car dashboard at night (left) and a plane's cockpit during the day (right). Note
similarities and differences, including the use of luminance, color, and some similar interaction
devices

to some new information? An example of this is the 'Cocktail-party effect', where
you can hear your name in a different conversation even though you are not paying
attention to that conversation in a crowded room.
Many researchers believe that our ability to process information without focal
attention is limited to surface features, syntactic properties, or similar shallow
features. In this view we cannot process the meaning of something without con-
scious attention. So we cannot remember something in the long-term without
paying conscious attention to it. This is thus the difference between hearing and
understanding, for example. Some evidence suggests that some meaning can be
processed without attention, but not very much, and that any long-term memory
that results will almost exclusively be of surface features.
The study of skilled, procedural performance reveals that we can, after
extensive practice, perform many things without paying much conscious attention
to them. Some of these skills (e.g., driving) are very sophisticated. With practice
we do not have to pay attention to as many subparts of the task. This allows us to
do another task at the same time (such as talk while drive). It also means that less
is actively processed, decreasing our memory for those aspects of the task. This
perhaps explains why it is hard to give directions for familiar routes, as the features
are no longer processed by attention.

5.3.1 Wickens' Theory of Attentional Resources

There are some more elaborate theories of attention. Perhaps the best known of these
is the theory of attentional resources developed by Wickens (e.g., Wickens and
Hollands 2000 ), illustrated in Fig. 5.6 . In this theory, Wickens proposes the idea that
users have multiple types of resources as a way of explaining how people time-share
across tasks and variations across people. Resources affect which part of perception