4. Attention Flashcards
Sustained attention
Maintain attention for a continuous or repetitive task
About 20 mins max
Varies with age
Selective attention
Ability to filter out noise and maintain focus on one thing
Divided attention
Ability to split attention between two tasks
Exogenous attention
When external stimuli grabs your attention
Processed in the inferior aspect of the frontoparietal network
Endogenous attention
Internal attention ie studying
Processed in superior aspect of frontoparietal network
Bottleneck theory of attention
Broadbent 1957
Early selections
Channelling info one thing at a time- similar to selective attention
Deutsch and Deutschland
1963
Argue that broadbents theory does not account for the fact that in a dichotomous listening task, info from the non attended side can still be recalled
Hemi spatial neglect
Unilateral parietal damage, more severe if right sided
Contralateral neglect
Patients don’t pay attention to one side of their visual field
They can still see things when they are pointed out- attention all not sensory
Balints syndrome
Patients have bilateral parietal damage
They are unaware of their deficit
They struggle to see the whole picture- simulatagnosia
Occulor motor apraxia- can’t move the eyes well
Optic ataxia - poor hand eye coordination
Evidence for early selection models (2studies)
Hillyard (1973)
N1 peak for listening task
Van hoorhins and Hillyard 1977
P1 peak to stimuli varies
Where / aphasia
Parietal lobe damage
Dorsal stream
What / agnosia
Temporal lobe / ventral stream
Evidence for late selection (1 study)
O’Craven et al 1999
FMRI study that showed activation in the Ppa and ffa respectively when people attended to houses or objects.
Focusses attention
Single out one stimulus from lots of noise
Feature integration theory
Treisman
Attention is used to bind different bits of information about a visual scene
Feature maps- colour and shape etc
Location maps- features that are close together are bound by attention
If only one feature is needed- no attention
However if a search requires colour and shape to be activated together, this requires attention
Frontoparietal network
Green et al
Hopfinger et al 2000
Frontal area is activated when there is a cue first
Parietal activated for switching attention
Corbetta et all 2002
Inferior area of the network is used for exogenous attention
Superior area is used for endogenous attention
Change blindness
Rensink et al 1997
Even large changes (substituting a human for horse head at a dinner table) can go unnoticed as long as there are no lighting or movement cues which are usually good at redirecting attention
Sarter et al 2001
Right sided frontoparietal areas are important in sustained attention
Cholinergic inputs from the forebrain mediate sustained attention. This is top down processing in the dorsal stream/ superior aspect of the areas involved
