Visual Attention Flashcards
(21 cards)
What is attention?
Preferentially processing some parts of a stimulus at the expense of other parts of the stimulus.
Why do we need attention?
You simply can’t process everything at once. It stops us from becoming overwhelmed.
What is overt attention?
Attending to an object by directly looking at it.
What is covert attention?
Not looking at the object that you are attending to.
How can we tell what someone is attending to?
Follow their eye movements
What are saccades?
The eye movements between fixations.
What is attentional capture?
Fixations being captured by salient parts of a scene when a scene is first presented. This is an involuntary process.
What do direct our fixations to?
To our expectations and goals. This is voluntary.
What captures our attention?
Pretty much anything that contrasts
-Regions of colour contrast or luminance contrast
-Regions of size contrast
-Regions orientation contrast
-Regions of motion/flicker contrast
What is a semantically inconsistent object?
Something that should not belong in a scene. Like a printer in place of a pot in a kitchen.
What is a syntactically inconsistent object?
Something that is the wrong position in a scene. E.g a floating pot in a kitchen.
Describe Posner’s experiment
Arrow would point to where an X would appear. If the X appeared where the arrow pointed, participants would respond faster than when the X was not in the direction of the arrow.
What did Carrasco et al.’s experiment find?
Attention can make objects appear to have a higher contrast.
What are the effects of attention?
Attention speeds responses
Attention can influence appearance
Attention can influence physiological responding
What is the binding problem?
The issue of how an object’s features are combined to make a coherent image. E.g both the colour and shape of an object.
What is the Feature Integration Theory and how does it relate to the binding problem?
It suggests that by attending to each object individually, you can solve the binding problem.
Discuss Treisman and Schmidt’s experiment in terms of Feature Integration Theory.
Presented sequences of two numbers
Asked to recall numbers
Then asked to recall colour of numbers.
Often associated the wrong colour with the wrong number.
These incorrect bindings are called illusory conjunctions.
What is Balint’s Syndrome?
A syndrome that makes a person very prone to illusory conjunctions (incorrectly binding different features of different objects)
Talk about visual searches
When a visual search requires the binding problem, it takes longer because you have to individually attend to each object.
What is change blindness?
When you are unaware of a change to a scene because you weren’t paying attention to it.
What are motion transients?
Changes generate motion transients that draw attention to the location change. This makes it easy to spot the change
