4. Attention

Question 1

Sustained attention

Answer 1

Maintain attention for a continuous or repetitive task

About 20 mins max

Varies with age

Question 2

Selective attention

Answer 2

Ability to filter out noise and maintain focus on one thing

Question 3

Divided attention

Answer 3

Ability to split attention between two tasks

Question 4

Exogenous attention

Answer 4

When external stimuli grabs your attention

Processed in the inferior aspect of the frontoparietal network

Question 5

Endogenous attention

Answer 5

Internal attention ie studying

Processed in superior aspect of frontoparietal network

Question 6

Bottleneck theory of attention

Answer 6

Broadbent 1957

Early selections

Channelling info one thing at a time- similar to selective attention

Question 7

Deutsch and Deutschland

Answer 7

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

Question 8

Hemi spatial neglect

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Balints syndrome

Answer 9

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

Question 10

Evidence for early selection models (2studies)

Answer 10

Hillyard (1973)
N1 peak for listening task

Van hoorhins and Hillyard 1977
P1 peak to stimuli varies

Question 11

Where / aphasia

Answer 11

Parietal lobe damage

Dorsal stream

Question 12

What / agnosia

Answer 12

Temporal lobe / ventral stream

Question 13

Evidence for late selection (1 study)

Answer 13

O’Craven et al 1999

FMRI study that showed activation in the Ppa and ffa respectively when people attended to houses or objects.

Question 14

Focusses attention

Answer 14

Single out one stimulus from lots of noise

Question 15

Feature integration theory

Answer 15

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

Question 16

Frontoparietal network

Answer 16

Green et al

Hopfinger et al 2000

Frontal area is activated when there is a cue first
Parietal activated for switching attention

Question 17

Corbetta et all 2002

Answer 17

Inferior area of the network is used for exogenous attention

Superior area is used for endogenous attention

Question 18

Change blindness

Answer 18

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

Question 19

Sarter et al 2001

Answer 19

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