Section 5 - Attention & Auditory Flashcards
(88 cards)
Selective attention (definition)
our ability to focus on processing a particular thing and ignore everything else
Attention capture (definition)
a failure of selective attention, often due to a sudden salient visual event
Attention deficit disorder
an abnormal inability to maintain focus on a selected item or event
Vigilance (definition)
our ability to hold focus on a selected item over time
The Spatial Cuing Paradigm
Attention to a location is space speeds the processing at that location. Demonstrated by validity cued lights being detected faster than neutrally cued, which were faster than invalidly cued lights.
The Attention Enhancement Effect
When two gratings have identical contrast, the contrast of the attended gratings appears higher.
Inattentional Blindness
When you are engaged in an attention-demanding task, you often fail to notice irrelevant salient visual stimuli (attention is needed for objects to reach awareness)
Neural Mechanisms of Selective Attention
When a preferred and a non-preferred stimulus are presented in the RF, and attention is directed to the preferred, the firing rate increases. IF attention is directed to the non-preferred stimulus, the firing rate decreases to the non-preferred stimulus rate. (Attending to a stimulus functionally restricts a neuron’s receptive field to that stimulus)
The Neural Basis of Attention
Attention enhances the firing rate of neurons. Neuronal firing rate was not only dependent on the size, orientation, or color of an object, but also on how important it is to the current task.
Divided attention (definition)
our ability to process multiple things at the same type
Is there a relationship between the size of processing focus and the speed of processing?
The Zoom Lens Theory of Attention explains that attention can be distributed broadly or narrowly, and there is a tradeoff between the size of focus and processing speed
The Zoom Lens Theory of Attraction
Broader distributions of attention will have slow processing of objects within the focus, while a narrow distribution of attention will result in fast processing of objects within the focus
Parallel processing (definition)
an operation that can be performed on many objects simultaneously
analysis of basic features that occurs at once across our entire visual field
Serial processing (definition)
an operation that can be performed on only one object at a time (one object is processed, then another, then another)
Set Size Effect (definition)
search times increase with the number of objects
The set size effect is ____ for target absent than target present; This is because _____
larger; this is because adding items slows target absent search since you have to individually check all items to ensure that it is absent. In the target present, you search about half on average.
How does parallel processing affect the difference in set size effect between target-absent and target-present search tasks?
Each object is processed at the same time, so adding more objects should not increase the total processing time. Both target present and target absent will be about the same.
How does serial search affect the set size effect?
The more individual shifts of attention (i.e., more objects/distractions), the longer the total search time. Target absent searches become exhaustive, meaning that each object is visited by attention.
The Binding Problem
The features of objects (form, motion, color, etc.) are scattered all throughout the cortex and need to be combined to form a unified percept of an object
Solution to The Binding Problem
The feature integration theory - attention binds features into objects
Feature Integration Theory
Attention acts as a “glue” that binds features into objects through two stages. In the pre-attentive stage, features are separated and known but are not bound into objects. In the focused attention stage, features are bound into a coherent object by the application of attention.
Stage 1 of Feature Integration Theory
The target can be detected simply from the pre-attentive analysis of features (e.g. you can quickly find a vertical red bar in a sea of all green vertical bars).
Stage 2 of Feature Integration Theory
This target is defined by a conjunction of features, not just one. Binding these features into objects requires attention (e.g. it requires attention to identify a red vertical bar when red horizontal bars and green vertical bars are also present in the visual field)
The Visual Salience Theory
Our visual system computes local measures of features contrast or “saliency” (decompose image into feature maps, then inhibit its neighbors in proportion to its activation)
