Attention Flashcards
(137 cards)
What is attention?
- “Everyone knows what attention is …. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and
is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which…is called distraction” - William James - Attention is best understood in terms of what it does rather than what it is
What are types of attention?
- top down attention
- bottom up attention
- arousal
What is top down attention?
- observer guided controlled attention
- frontal parietal brain regions
- a goal or target in mind directs your attention
- voluntary attention
- controlled, preparing to attention and setting goals
What is arousal?
- alertness and awareness
- autonomic nervous system, reticular activating system
- physiologically based
What is bottom up attention?
- stimuli guided automatic attention
- physical stimuli and salience
- purely guided by external factors
- automatic attentional orienting
What are the neural mechanisms of attention?
- a network of regions across frontal and parietal lobes
What brain regions are used for top down attention?
- intraparietal sulcus / intraparietal lobule
- frontal eye fields
What brain regions are used for bottom up attention?
- temporoparietal junction
- ventral frontal cortex
What is attentional shift?
- shift between attending to image vs sound
What are the types of divisions of attention?
- endogenous attention
- exogenous attention
What is endogenous attention?
- when an individual chooses what to pay attention to (goals and intention)
- top down processing
- intraparietal sulcus and frontal eye fields
What is exogenous attention?
- when stimuli in the environment drives us to pay attention
- bottom up processing
- temporoparietal junction and ventral frontal cortex
What is spatial neglect?
- damage to the right hemisphere, ventral parietal cortex
- deficits in spatial attention and egocentric representations in contralateral field of view
- cannot attend or report stimuli on opposite side of legion
- cannot see things on left side
- is not just about vision, if blindfolded will also have problems searching for objects on the left side of the table
What can be done to help with spatial neglect?
- severity can be modulated by behavioural interventions over very short timescales
- training to increase alertness
- ask to perform hand movements to neglected side
- only lasts a small amount of time
This brain region would be engaged when you are actively searching for a black car in a crowded lot, this would make black cars more salient in the visual system.
a. Reticular Activating System
b. Frontal Eye Fields
c. Temporal Parietal Junction
d. PNS
b
What are the types of attention in top down attention?
- sustained attention
- divided attention
- selective attention
What is sustained attention?
- maintain focus on one input for a long period of time
- vigilance
- the ability to focus on one task
- concentration
What is divided attention?
- shifting attentional focus between tasks
- multi tasking
- the ability to attend to more than one task
- task switching
What is selective attention?
- focus on one input and ignore other information
Why do we have selective attention?
- we have limited information processing resources
- must prioritize what to process
- this will depend on goal (what you want to attend to)
What are the theories of selective attention?
- early selection filter models
- attenuator
- late selection filter models
- load theory
What is Broadbent’s early selection filter model?
- you filter information at the level of perception, before information is processed for meaning (semantic analysis)
- select information via perception (spatial location, frequency of sound)
- selected information is processed for meaning, enters awareness
- information nit selected by the filter decays and is not processed for meaning
sensory buffer -FILTER-> perceptual analysis –> semantic analysis (short term memory) –> responses
What proof is there for the early selection model?
- dichotic listening tasks
What is the dichotic listening task in the early selection model?
- present two different simultaneous messages to each ear
- participants better to recall ear by ear than the simultaneous message (they will remember the info from the hear they are paying attention to)
- conclusion: information is selected for attention at perception
- shadowing task (repeat info from attended ear)
- people do not remember the content of an unattended message, but they notice some sensory features (new noise, gender of speaker)
- evidence that unattended information is not processed for meaning but perception