Lecture 11 + 12 Attention Flashcards
Summaries William James’ definition of attention
taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form of one out of other possible objects
Studying attention: Covert paradigm
Posner (1980) fixating on the cross, a then either an exogenous (near target) and endogenous (not near target/deliberate) cue
spotlight metaphor
clear and vivid form and one moment in time
Attention network
Experts identified three areas: posterior parietal lobe (disengage), superior colliculus (move) and pulvinar (enhance)
Changed blindness
When shown two pictures presented after another with a slight difference (with a small interval), we cannot see this difference, but when we are told to attend what changes in the visual scene, we can’t not see it.
Research: Neisser and becklen (1975)
superimposed videos and p had to count either when hands touched or ball passed - but couldn’t do them both at the same time even when slowed down .5.
Visual search/pop out effect
In visual searches, we direct attention to diff parts of the screen but if one part of this visual scene differed, there would be a pop-out effect (automatically search for salient things)
Feature searches
Search for things defined by a single feature but when defined by conjunction (two features) is more difficult - have to move attention endogenously
Feature integreation theory - Treisman
each feature registered in the feature map (done without attention) joining these requires a glue to link together - this part is unknown
Problems with feature detection theroy
- when horizontal gradients are easier to detect than vertical
- 3D nature is easier to detect than 2D
- triangles pointing up amongst downward triangles is easier to point out
Visual search in eye movements
strong relationship between number of saccades and time taken to search - two rules : similarity and closeness
