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Di(Elwin) Feng

Instructor: Eugene Riordan Jr

Writing 2

6 December 2022

Genre: A Ted Talk Script

Title: How Attention Serves Visual System to Filter the World

(PowerPoint Cover Page)

I want to start with a test. Don't worry. It's easy. To complete the test, all you need is to

find a guy wearing a white shirt in the picture.

Fig. 1 Kidshelpline, Five people in a party, 2022

(PowerPoint page 1)

It's not hard, right? You looked at the picture. Not needing half a second you can say he’s the

second from the left, whose hair is pink. This is such a stupid question, but don't be urgent to

speak it out. Hold on for a second and think about how your brain worked so efficiently to

accomplish the process. It seems easy. You saw it and your brain worked to tell you the answer.
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However, the whole process is inconceivably complicated and it took cognitive psychologists

decades to solve this problem.

I will try to sum up the astonishing process in a couple of sentences. First, while you

heard my question-"finding the guy in the white shirt", your eardrums responded to the sound

waves, and your auditory nerves attaching the eardrums transduced all the auditory information

to electronic signals. Then, the electronic signals acted by action potentials carried the auditory

signal to relative brain regions. (PowerPoint page 2) Transferring outside stimuli to neural

signals is a bottom-up process named by cognitive psychologists. They usually use the

bottom-up process to describe brain activities affected by the outside world. In the previous

situation, your auditory system received the pitch signals and reported them to your brain, so

your brain started automatically operating on the meaning of words. Another bottom-up process

was while hearing the question command, your optic nerves simultaneously acquired the visual

image and sent it to the brain.

(PowerPoint page 3)

While your visual and auditory brain areas generated a basic understanding of the picture,

such as the corresponding visible color to the word white and the locational information of the

man, your language system could begin to organize suitable languages to describe the position.

For example, he’s the second from the left and has pink hair. It is worth mentioning that if you

concentrated merely on the features of the man in a white shirt and ignored others after noticing

my question, your brain was in a top-down process, which described how your thought

influenced your perception and attention. Okay, while processing all the previous steps, your

brain warrants 100 billion neurons to fire, a pretty large number, but only takes half a second.

(PowerPoint page 4)
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The human brain is really fascinating (Tip: Pause for a second). A few years before,

cognitive psychologists became interested in understanding attention because they realized

things that humans could pay attention to were limited. For example, can you remember the hair

color of the woman wearing glasses in the previous picture? (Tip: after a few seconds back to the

picture) It’s blond. I believe most people cannot remember it. If you are a genius, please never

mind.

Since as humans we cannot notice all the details going through our daily life, our brains

have to filter unnecessary information and retain the useful ones. Therefore, you can merely

concentrate your attention on useful things. If there is too much information for you to focus on,

you also won’t handle them at the same time. Here’s an “orange juice” model that psychologists

used for describing human attention. (PowerPoint page 5) They said attention could be regarded

as a fixed amount of “orange juice”. Our brains could split it into different cups, which were the

information we paid attention to, but the more we divided it the less we got the amount in each

cup, which meant if there were distractors, additional cups, that attenuated our attention, it took

longer time for us to do the thing we were currently working on.

In order to shorten response time, our brains have developed skills to suppress or reject

salient distractions. Two types of regulators are functional to attenuate distractions. Being

accustomed to feature-based information can reduce the time to find specific items. On the other

hand, being distracted by an object having a shape or color increases the tendency to ignore it

next time. (PowerPoint page 6) For location-based information that often guides attention toward

a probable location decreases item-finding time. Otherwise, it shortens rejection time from

distractors. These two types of regulators build up the selection history in our brains, which

produces a faster response time when your brain is requested to process similar visual captures.
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Fig. 2 Everton, dark pool party, 2021

(PowerPoint page 7)

Let’s bring the concepts to a real-life situation. Dany is at a pool party. He is looking for

his girlfriend. Because it isn’t the first time they come to the party, Dany knows his girlfriend

loves to sit at the south corner near the pool and she’s wearing a fluorescent yellow bikini as

always, so the location and feature regularities guide his attention toward the corner and anything

in the color of fluorescent yellow!

(PowerPoint page 8)

Let’s see if there are some distractors. In the first situation, Dany’s girlfriend isn’t the

only one wearing a fluorescent yellow bikini. Actually, the dress code for the party is wearing

something fluorescent, so a lot of color distraction blocks Dany’s attentional captures based on

features. He can merely follow location-based clues. He learns it pretty fast and no longer relies

on color as a clue. In this situation, without the feature regularity of color, Dany takes more time

to find his girlfriend as compared to the first situation.

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(PowerPoint page 9)

In another condition, Dany checks the place where his girlfriend usually sits.

Unfortunately, she isn't there. But this time the party doesn’t have a dress code, so there aren’t a

lot of people wearing fluorescent colors. Dany no longer looks for the place at the corner and

starts to look for the color “yellow.” This condition removes a locational clue, which also needs

more time for Dany to find her girlfriend.

(PowerPoint page 10)

After learning the example, I hope you have a better understanding of how attention

serves the visual system to filter the world. Both feature-based and color-based information help

you guide your attention and attenuate the time spent on visual filtration. This kind of filtration is

automatically happening all the time. After my presentation, I hope you can think and try to

understand how your visual system and attention work together to help you see things and make

decisions in real life. Thank you!

Outline of the Ted Talk presentation

● Hook question: Find a guy in a white shirt.

● Elaborate on the process of visual perception, and introduce top-down and bottom-up

theories.

● Introduce the “juice” model, and how factors guide your attention.

● Introduce feature-based and location-based regularities.

● A real-life situation with a protagonist Dany to explain the concepts.

● Brief conclusion.
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Reflection

Choosing the correct genre to accomplish the purpose of writing makes it halfway to

success, so understanding how one piece of content can be adequately translated into two genres

and serving different audience groups is paramount. For this assignment, I translated a journal

article, Feature-based Statistical Regularities of Distractors Modulate Attentional Capture,

written by Brad T. Stilwell, Brett Bahle, and Shaun P. Vecer, to a Ted Talk script (2019). The

attentional capture study suggested that location-based and feature-based information could

guide visual attention away from or forward to a target. I considered several questions to help me

develop a new genre while writing. They were how I should craft the script to suit the intended

audience, what the content differences made them disparate genres, what tones and materials I

should include in the new genre, and how I explained the professional concepts accurately and

absorbingly. My passion for translating a cognitive psychology topic is that although attentional

filtration and capture in visual perception are happening incessantly, people hardly have a chance

to know them and learn the mechanisms in life. From my perspective, comprehending our human

bodies is more crucial than learning about the physical outside world. Therefore, I wish to

introduce the topic to general people.

Ted talks are a perfect medium to disseminate brilliant new ideas to the public, and it has

a customized audience group. Firstly, Ted Talks are free and accessible to everyone having a

mobile phone. This characteristic gives everyone a chance to start watching the presentation and

learn brief knowledge about the mechanism of attention. Secondly, the Ted Talk presentation is

designed for people interested in knowing mechanism of visual selection system but without

time or profession to read a psychological journal article. These characteristics tailor the Ted
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Talk to a non-academic writing genre but require me to convey the concepts precisely and

succinctly. The translation also tests my ability to stand in the shoes of a nonprofessional

individual to describe professional ideas. Hence, the convention of the Ted Talk should be

rigorous and reachable for readers who do not have a knowledge background of cognition.

Thirdly, advanced progress in studying the areas of attention capture and filtration is rarely

known by the general public. The platform Ted Talk is a magnificent place to spread knowledge

to the folk by inviting influential people to present their new findings in their areas.

There are significant differences between a journal article and a Ted Talk. Defining their

similarities and distinctions helped me select the contents in the old genre and add examples to

the new genre while writing the script. A journal article chiefly focuses on a description of the

background of their study, data analysis, and repeatability of the experiments. However, none

would like to hear dull data analysis and complicated experimental design in a Ted Talk. The

major objective of a Ted Talk is to explain the new theories and provide the audience with

appropriate examples to help understand the theories, which concentrate on facts and intriguing

instances. Accordingly, I removed the data analysis and experimental designs in the Ted Talk

script. I then added corresponding daily life stories and pictures corresponding to the main

theories. One of the class reading materials enlightened me at this point. In the article “How to

Read Like a Writer”, Mike Bunn the author taught me while reading, I should try to understand

the ways that the author arranges the article (2021). Reading and writing can be juxtaposed. For a

journal article, the purpose is to instruct other scientists on how to repeat the experimental

process and explain the novel findings in the area. This is why a journal article has salient

subtitles and a strict format. However, my writing script serves as popular science material, so

adding an example regarding daily life to explain each concept can be perfect. Furthermore, I
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included a number of intensifiers, such as “so”, “very”, and “really” in the script because for

presentation these words can be directly emphasized and there aren't a lot of strict rules for

non-using them. I also avoided writing it like a lecture script. The content of a lecture is more

intensive compared with a presentation and a lecture needs to highlight the significant

statements. In contrast, for the presentation, I designed more interactions than a lecture.

How constructing the Ted Talk and making the materials contribute to the audience are

all the twists and turns while writing. I watched some videos on the Ted website to gain a basic

understanding of its structure and learn their tones for conveying information. Subsequently, I

chose a light and amusing tone to write the script. I additionally made some PowerPoint pages,

tips in the script, and an outline after the script. Graphs are paramount as the visual aspect of a

Ted Talk. The script and the graphs are mutually beneficial to demonstrate the presentation

content. For the tips and outline, they provide the speaker with a concise and brief notification.

I was not confined by a presentation and intend to explore deeper in the subgenre of a popular

science Ted Talk. This is another helpful suggestion I learned from class reading. “Navigating

Genres” is an essay written by Kerry Dirk. Drik encourages students to explore new areas of a

genre and doesn’t want them to be limited by the old principles (2021). Therefore, I arranged the

cognitive concepts and examples to intersect and expanded some old concepts in the introduction

part of the journal article to help the audience easier to understand.

After submitting the first draft, I talked to Eugene. He suggested I imitate a real Ted talk

because every script is supposed to transfer into a video. I agreed with his idea, so I recorded a

presentation and believed the final version could achieve the ideal effect. Despite this, if

someone finds a real lecture hall and presents the script will make the effect of TedTalk better.

The presenter can include more body language than I do in the presentation. To serve the
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audience understand the presentation materials, I added more PowerPoint pages to illustrate the

example. For instance, I had a pool picture of "Dany finding his girlfriend” example. I did not

draw the stick figures representing people and his girlfriend before but added the illustrations

while revising the script. By merely imagining the feature- or locational-based circumstances, the

audience without professional backgrounds may find it hard to comprehend the meaning of the

example. Therefore, I intended to include more pictures for the presentation about visual

cognition studies. Eugene pointed out a paragraph that was hard to understand. After reading it, I

realized that I included too much professional vocabulary without giving explanations to make it

hard to understand. Some terms I knew the meaning were unfamiliar to people without cognitive

psychology backgrounds. Then, I put myself in their shoes and reorganized the paragraph to

make it more logical.

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Works cited

Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Space: Reading on writing, vol.1,Parlor

Press, 2021.

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Space: Reading on writing, vol.1,Parlor Press, 2021.

Everton, Alise. “Glow Stick Pool Party – Glow In The Dark Pool Party Themes”. Poolmagazine,

September 7,2021.

https://www.poolmagazine.com/lifestyle/throw-a-glow-stick-pool-party.

Kidshelpline. Five people in a party. Kidshelpline, 2022.

https://kidshelpline.com.au/young-adults/issues/staying-safe-parties-and-clubs.

Stilwell, B. T., Bahle, B., & Vecera, S. P. (2019). Feature-based Statistical Regularities of

Distractors Modulate Attentional Capture. Journal of experimental psychology. Human

perception and performance, 45(3), 419–433. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000613