Wk10 Attention

Question 1

What are two key ideas about how attention works?

Answer 1

Capacity and selectivity

Question 2

What attention is NOT?

Answer 2

Alertness and arousal

Question 3

What is capacity of attention?

Answer 3

The amount of perceptual resources available for a task/process, which can vary with the task or individual.

Question 4

What is selectivity of attention?

Answer 4

How perceptual resources are allocated to different subsets of info in a flexible way. What gets processed and doesn’t.

Question 5

What does the cocktail party effect show?

Answer 5

Attention can be re-directed and info selected in various ways.

Question 6

What is one of the most salient pieces of info in the dichotic listening task?

Answer 6

Your own name.

Question 7

Where does early selection propose the attentional filter is?

Answer 7

After sensory registration, before perceptual/semantic analysis.

Question 8

Where does late selection propose the filter is?

Answer 8

After perceptual/semantic analysis

Question 9

Theory of selection proposes increased interference from irrelevant info? And why?

Answer 9

Late selection; more time spent processing irrelevant info for meaning.

Question 10

how do distractors interfere with attention? 3

Answer 10

Slowed RT 
Reduced accuracy
Changes to trajectories in moving to targets

Question 11

What are the RT costs of irrelevant info?

Answer 11

It slows responses, particularly when opposite responses need to be inhibited

Question 12

What changes to movement trajectories towards a target show about distractors?

Answer 12

The distractors is still processed and makes its way into movement calculation. Even when not a physical obstacle.

Question 13

Is distractors interference due to obstruction in the physical world?

Answer 13

No, eye saccades are affected by (recoded) by Irrelevant information.

Question 14

What are attention mechanisms we use when dealing with busy visual scenes? 6

Answer 14

Overt (eye movements) 
Shifting attention 
Top-down/Bottom-up 
Spotlight
Zoom lens 
Parrallel/serial search

Question 15

What is an overt deployment of attention?

Answer 15

Eyes move to shift attention

Question 16

What is covert deployment of attention?

Answer 16

Eyes are fixed but attention shifts

Question 17

Does the type of stimulus determine the extent of neuronal activation?

Answer 17

Yes

Question 18

What are three components of shifting attention?

Answer 18

1. Disengagement
2. Movement
3. Engagement

Question 19

What three brain areas are involved in shifting attention?

Answer 19

Disengagment = right parietal lobe

Movement = superior colliculus 

Engagement = thalamus

Question 20

What is the poster cuing paradigm? How does it use valid and invalid trials?

Answer 20

An endogenous cue (arrow symbol) is used to cue attention. Trials can be valid or invalid where arrow is correctly signalling where the target will appear.

Question 21

What are the results of the posner cuing paradigm?

Answer 21

Valid trials (correct arrow cues) provide RT benefit. 
Invalid trials incur cost; due to disengagement.

Question 22

What happens when endogenous cues shift attention?

Answer 22

attention must voluntarily pushed from the central cue.

Question 23

What happens when exogenous cues shift attention?

Answer 23

Attention is drawn to the location of cue and cannot be ignored.

Question 24

Why do monkey studies suggest that V1 doesn’t process attended or non-attended stimuli?

Answer 24

No difference in V1 activation regardless of whether a covert point is attended or not.

Question 25

What do monkey studies show about which areas of visual processing respond to covert vs overt attention?

Answer 25

V4/IT reacts to complex stimuli which are covertly attended.

Question 26

What do ERPs show about covert attention in humans?

Answer 26

Valid cues result in enhanced P1 and N1 over right occipital cortex. This shows enhanced processing of validly cued target.

Question 27

What three components of a ‘spotlight’ does attention share?

Answer 27

It has a fringe, a focus, and a margin. Clear in the middle, less clear further out.

Question 28

How is attention like a zoom lens? What task illustrates this shift in attention?

Answer 28

It can narrow and expand (shown by local global tasks)

Question 29

What is the relationship between interference from distractors and visual degrees?

Answer 29

Less than 1 deg = large interference

Question 30

What is distributed attention?

Answer 30

“Pop out” parallel processing

Question 31

What is focused attention?

Answer 31

Serial processing; selecting bits of the environment at a time

Question 32

What is visual processing when using focused attention?

Answer 32

A series of attentional fixations, each covering a different region of the visual field.

Question 33

What types of ERPs are found in distributed attention search?

Answer 33

Frontal and occipital activations for pop out feature search

Question 34

What are the relationships between # of distractors and response time for parallel and serial search?

Answer 34

No RT cost for parallel search due to distractors. Whereas, distractors increase RT for serial search.

Question 35

What does inattentional blindness tell us?

Answer 35

We cannot always process features which were not attended to; the filter

Question 36

What are critical areas involved in left sided neglect and extinction?

Answer 36

Right parietal lobe: angular gyrus and parahippocampal gyrus; after middle cerebral artery stroke.

Question 37

What tasks can be used to test hemispatial neglect?

Answer 37

Line bisection, copying, cancellation, drawing from memory.

Question 38

What is impaired in left-sided neglect? 4

Answer 38

Disengagement from right sided stimuli
Shifting & engagement to left sided stimuli
Capacity limits (difficulty) 
Distributed attention

Question 39

How do eye movements change after the onset of spatial neglect?

Answer 39

Patients cant look to left side, but this is somewhat resolved after a process of weeks

Question 40

How do you show unconscious processing in spatial neglect patients? What does this show about the mental processes affected?

Answer 40

Pictures of a house, one is on fire. Ps cant tell which one is different, but they respond to “which house would you prefer to live in” correctly. There is some unconscious representation of left sided objects.

Question 41

What shows that mental representation is affected by spatial neglect, not physical representation?

Answer 41

Piazza del Duomo study; spatial neglect remains for imaginary shifts in space (mental representation)

Question 42

How is visual extinction different from neglect?

Answer 42

Better detection of left events when nothing is on the right, or presented earlier than right.

Question 43

Why do we not get right sided neglect? What would happen to a lesion on either the left or right side?

Answer 43

The right hemisphere covers some of the right visual fields as well as left vf. 
Left lesion = little effect (right hemi processes some of both VFs)
Right lesion = loss of left side