Attention In Performance

Attention and Performance XIV, provides a broad, historic, and timely synthesis of the empirical and theoretical ideas on which performance theory now rests.

This book elucidates how learning from actors enables an intense education of attention for anthropologists. Actors perform the perception of sunshine, the sensation of pain, affects such as shock and emotions such as happiness; they act quarrels, erotic attraction, leadership and submission on stage. In order to achieve that, they undergo an education of attention, allowing them to develop skills that are also useful for anthropologists, particularly when doing research on phenomena that often elude academic procedures. Drawing on her own acting experiences and ongoing research with actors from Africa and Europe, Cassis Kilian takes up Tim Ingold’s manifold proposals to reconfigure anthropological research. She introduces approaches actors use to explore the complexity of human life and its bodily, sensual and emotional dimensions, which can be difficult for academics to grasp when examining topics such as everyday practices, traumatic experiences and power relations. Though the book discerns pitfalls in anthropological research and suggests artistic approaches to overcome them, it values anthropology as a discipline whose radical self-reflexive approach allows for such experiments. Including exercises and practical approaches, this is valuable reading for scholars interested in anthropological methods, sensory anthropology, perception and materiality, and theatre anthropology.

Compiled as a result of the Thirteenth Symposium of the Association for Attention and Performance, this collection focuses on the Symposium's theme: Organization of Action. The book is arranged in sections which provide a comprehensive view of the main issues raised during the meeting. Several aspects of the theme were considered, including: the anatomical and physiological constraints on motor preparation and execution . the influence of control (proprioceptive, cutaneous, visual, oculomotor) signals the contribution of kinematics to the understanding of the underlying mechanisms and the role of cognitive constraints such as attention or learning in goal selection This new volume is of particular interest to professionals and researchers in cognitive psychology, physiology, and neuropsychology as well as those studying motor skills.

In 1966 the first meeting of the Association for the Study of Attention and Performance was held in the Netherlands to promote the emerging science of cognitive psychology. This volume is based on the most recent conference, held in Israel thirty years later. The focus of the conference was the interaction between theory and application. The organizers chose the specific topic, cognitive regulation of performance, because it is an area where contemporary theories of cognitive processes meet the everyday challenges posed by human interactions with complex systems. Present-day technological systems impose on the operator a variety of supervisory functions, such as input and output monitoring, allocation of cognitive resources, choice of strategies, and regulation of cognitive operations. A challenge for engineers and designers is to accommodate the cognitive requirements called for by these systems. The book is divided into four sections: the presentation and representation of information, cognitive regulation of acquisition and performance, consciousness and behavior, and special populations: aging and neurological disorders. Contributors Nicole D. Anderson, Moshe Bar, Lynn Bardell, Alice E. Barnes, Irving Biederman, Robert A. Bjork, Richard A. Block, Fergus I. M. Craik, Heiner Deubel, John Dunlosky, Ido Erev, Ronald Fisher, John M. Flach, Barry Goettl, Morris Goldsmith, Daniel Gopher, Lynn Hasher, Okihide Hikosaka, Larry L. Jacoby, Peter Kalocsai, Colleen Kelley, David E. Kieras, Roberta Klatzky, Asher Koriat, Arthur F. Kramer, Elisabetta Ladavas, John L. Larish, Susan J. Lederman, John Long, Cynthia P. May, Guiliana Mazzoni, Brian McElree, David Meyer, Satoru Miyauchi, Neville Moray, Louis Narens, Thomas O. Nelson, Raymond S. Nickerson, Lynne Reder, J. Wesley Regian, Ian Robertson, Wolfgang Schneider, Christian D. Schunn, Wayne Shebilske, Shinsuke Shimojo, Suresh Subramaniam, Tom N. Trainham, Jehoshua Tsal, Timothy A. Weber, Christopher Wickens, Rose T. Zacks, Dan Zakay

This title describes current research findings in the study of human performance Experts from all fields of performance are brought together, covering domains including sports, the performing arts, business, executive coaching, the military, and other applicable, high-risk professions.

Originally published in 1985, this volume presents the proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Attention and Performance. With few exceptions, the central emphasis in previous meetings of the Attention and Performance Association was on the information-processing approach to normal human cognition. This emphasis had been supplemented, on occasion, by studies employing EEG methods, but there had not been systematic attempts to relate the information-processing approach to work in the neurosciences. This volume seeks to emphasize the search for mechanism with such methods of approach as the following: anatomical, physiological, neuropsychological, behavioral, and computational. The editors believed that this was in accord with recent developing trends in cognition and particularly with developments in the study of attention at the time.

The thirty-two contributions discuss evidence from psychological experiments with healthy and brain-damaged subjects, functional imaging, electrophysiology, and computational modeling.

The thinker who has a mortal fear of being wrong will give all that is valuable in himself to that little ambition. Walter Lippmann (1914) Psychology has always been plagued by passing fads and fan cies to a greater extent than is seemly in a scientific discipline. Over the past few years the Zeitgeist can be summed up by the two words 'cognitive psychology'. Indeed, a recent poll of academic psychologists in American indicated that over 80% of them regarded themselves as cognitive psychologists! Cognitive psychology is in the ascendant, but it has never been clear to me that it has addressed all of the appropriate is sues. In particular, information processing in the real world (and even in the laboratory) occurs within a motivational and emotional context, but cognitive psychologists usually main tain the convenient fiction that cognition can fruitfully be stud ied in isolation. The main reason for writing this book was to at tempt to demonstrate that there can be a useful cross-fertiliza tion between cognitive and motivational-emotional psycholo gy and that there are already tantalizing glimpses of the poten tial advantages of such inter-disciplinary research. The ideas of Donald Broadbent and his associates have exer cised a formative influence during the writing of this book. They discovered some years ago that there are intriguing simi larities (as well as differences) in the effects on performance of such apparently quite disparate factors as white noise, time of day, introversion-extraversion and incentive.