Visual Attention

Question 1

What does attention do?

Answer 1

Filter (gatekeep)
Find (spotlight) and binding
Favour (weighting/bias)

Question 2

What’s the relationship between attention and eye movements

Answer 2

Eye movements can control the ‘spotlight’ of selective visual processing
They control what high resolution information we can access (as fine details are only represented in central vision)

Your attention is already there before your eyes –> shifts of attention often precedes eye movements
You can attend without looking (covert attention)

Question 3

Contrast saccades and fixations

Answer 3

Saccades: small, rapid eye movements
Fixations: pauses in eye movements that indicated where a person is attending (typically make 3 fixations per second)

Question 4

How does attention enhance brain activation?

Answer 4

You get more resources for processing something when you allocate attention to it.
The primary visual cortex has a lower enhancement than middle temporal, which has a lower enhancement than medial superior temporal.

Attentional enhancement is greater in higher visual areas.

Question 5

How are we biased in our attention (bottom up vs top down)

Answer 5

inherent bottom up bias (attend to info relevant to survival)

can deliberately tune (top-down) our attention to the processing of task relevant information (central executive)

Question 6

What does endogenous mean

Answer 6

Intentional, goal-directed shifting of attention to a location (can be directed without eye movements)

Posner cueing task
- valid cue is that the arrow is pointing to the one of the 2 cards that has the target, invalid cue is the arrow is pointing to the one without the target

Question 7

What does exogenous mean

Answer 7

reflexive, involuntary shifting of attention (attentional capture)
- bottom up

Posner cueing task
- flash of red light before the letter
- does the letter occur on the card with or without the red light

Question 8

Difference between exogenous and endogenous

Answer 8

Exogenous is fast and brief (reflexive)
Endogenous is slower (goal directed - voluntary)

Question 9

What are the 3 components attention can select for

Answer 9

Spatial locations (regions of space) - the information in the specific spatial region is enhanced
Features (e.g. colour) –> information matching that feature
Objects (a person or thing) - all information within the selected object is enhanced

Question 10

What is the binding problem

Answer 10

Binding = process by which features are combined to create coherent objects
- features of objects are processed separately in different ares of the brain, how do features get bound in the brain?

Question 11

What is feature integration theory?

Answer 11

Basic features are processed in parallel by pre-attentive processing
Pre-attentive features are free floating
Attention is required to bind features together
Therefore failures of attention can lead to illusory conjunctions (where features that should be associated with one object are incorrectly associated with another)