Attention Flashcards
What’s the bottom up approach?
Alertness e.no loud noise,
Reflective attention e.g bright light,
Spotlight attention and visual search.
What’s the top down attention?
Selective attention- choose whether to look or listen
What is the retina?
Made up of photoreceptor cells. Broken Into two areas: the fovea and parafovea
What is the fovea?
Most are cones, high concentration of cone photoreceptors
What is the parafovea?
Less cells, mostly rods. Works well in low light
How does the eye work?
Acuity drops when something appears from centre of the retina,
Brain fills in gap by frequent eye movements and holds visual info,
When does acuity happen?
Highest at centre of retina
What are saccadic supressions?
Where brain selectivity blocks visual processing during eye movements but isn’t noticeable to viewer.
Eye travels up to 900 visual degrees per second.
Lasts up to 50ms
What is attended information?
Info in or around the fovea
What is unattended information?
Everything else
Is called overt attention.
What is overt attention?
Using fovea, slow, 3-4 saccades per second.
What is Covert attention?
Faster- 50ms to shift.
What are the two primary themes?
Capacity limitation and selective or focused attention.
What is capacity limitation?
Limited ability to carry out various mental operations at the same time
What is divided attention?
Ability to undertake several tasks at once.
What did Welford 1952 do?
Presented two sounds, reaction time to 2nd stimulus depends on how close it is presented to first stimulus.
The closer the presentation the slower the reaction time.
What is meant by zoom lens?
Attentions is directed to a given region of the visual field- can be increased or decreased.
What is inattentional blindness?
Identifying something irrelevant to the task
What did Resnick 2000 find?
Change blindness suggests there’s a failure of visual short term memory- can compare between scenes.
May be a limit in the number of items we can hold in memory.
What did Luck and Vogel 1997 find?
Measured short term memory. 1-12 colour patches shown.
Asked to look for a change in orientation colour or both,
No difference in performance, VSTM for objects not features
