Attention Flashcards
(26 cards)
Limited resources
Attention has been described as a spotlight, which switches around depending on what captures our attention, therefore it is limited and can only do one thing at a time
Method of information filtering
There is an infinite amount of information that we can attend to, parietal lobe filters this and directs attention to important things
Treisman’s Attentuation Model
Has attenuating filter and hierarchy of analysers
Shadowing task
Participants heard one thing in one ear and one thing in another and were able to attend to one specific ear and hear the message
Cocktail party effect
When you hear your name or something relevant to you, you find yourself paying attention to the conversation, even if previously you couldn’t hear anything they were saying
Endogenous
Cognitive phenomena originating from within the body (central, symbolic cues)
Exogenous
Phenomena which originate outside the body (spatial, peripheral)
Inattentional blindness
It is easy to miss something that you are not looking for (the invisible gorilla - Simons & Chabris, 1999)
Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA)
Time between the onset of first stimulus and onset of a second stimulus
Inter-stimulus interval (ISI)
Time between offset of first stimulus and onset of second stimulus
Inhibition of return
Helps to facilitate attention switching to other aspects of the visual array, being slower to respond to a target at a cued location after a delay
What is the Navon task?
Big letters made out of small letters and participants are asked to either identify the small letters of the large one
What does the Navon task assess?
Spatial processing
Attention spotlight can widen or narrow depending on the task we are doing
What are the two types of spatial processing?
Global and local
What is the Stroop task?
Participants are presented with words written in colours and they are asked to say the word, or the colour that the word is written in
What does the Stroop task assess?
How the attention system integrates features
What is the visual search task?
Participants are asked to search for a letter in a visual array of letters
What is a parallel search?
Features of the target are different from the distractor items, so you search the whole array simultaneously
What is a conjunctive search?
Searching through each letter individually as the target is similar to the distractors
How can eye-tracking be used to investigate attention?
Eye-tracking shows where on an image people pay attention, the more fixated they are on a part, the more attention they are paying and the more interested they are
What does the visual search task assess?
How the attention system integrates features
Barron, Riby, Greer and Smallwood (2011) - mind wandering
Participants were asked to respond to rare target event (red circle) that appeared in a series of other stimuli (green and blue squares)
Green were presented frequently, blue were presented as much as the red circle
Increase in parietal cortex neuron activity shown about 300-500ms after red
Similar increase shown in frontal lobe after blue
Ppts completed a survey about mind wandering and were separated into high . medium and low mind wandering
Subjects in the high group showed less frontal and parietal cortex activity when the red circle and blue square were shown
Supports idea that when the mind is wandering, the subjects were not paying attention to anything, not that they were being distracted
What would show distraction from the current task?
Higher frontal cortex activity when blue squares were shown
Dunn, Freeth & Milne (2016)
Participants passively watched a screen and asked if blue t was inverted or upright
Two groups, high and low autism quotient
High AQ’s N2pc component is much larger than those who scored low on AQ
High AQ participants were processing even irrelevant information strongly, supressing distracting information was harder for high AQ participants
