6 Visual Attention

Question 0

Divided attention

Answer 0

Directing attention to a number of things at once.

Question 1

Attention

Answer 1

Process of seeking out and focusing on stimuli like that are of interest in a way that causes these stimuli to become more deeply processed then those that are not receiving our attention.

Question 2

Fixation

Answer 2

Pause of the eye that occurs between eye movements as a person scans is seen.

Question 3

Saccades

Answer 3

Small, rapid eye movement.

Question 4

Stimulus salience

Answer 4

Characteristics such as bright colors, high contrast, and highly visible orientations that cause stimuli to stand out and therefore attract attention.

Question 5

Saliency map

Answer 5

A “map” of a visual display that takes into account characteristics of the display such as color, contrast, and orientation that are associated with capturing attention. This mat predicts which areas a person is most likely to attend to.

Question 6

Selective attention

Answer 6

Focusing attention on specific objects and ignoring others.

Question 7

Inattentional blindness

Answer 7

Situation in which a stimulus that is not intended to is not perceived, even though the person is looking directly at it.

Question 8

Change blindness

Answer 8

Difficulty in detecting differences between two visual stimuli that are presented with another stimulus interposed between them. Also occurs when part of the stimulus is changed very slowly.

Question 9

Precueing

Answer 9

Procedure in which a cue stimulus is presented to direct an observer’s attention to a specific location where a test stimulus is likely to be presented. This procedure is used by Posner to show that attention enhances the processing of a stimulus presented at the cued location.

Question 10

Binding

Answer 10

Process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object.

Question 11

Binding problem

Answer 11

Problem of how neural activity of many separated areas in the brain is combined to create a perception of a coherent object.

Question 12

Feature integration theory

Answer 12

Sequence of steps proposed by Treisman to explain how an object is broken down into features and how these features are recombined to result in perception of the object.

Question 13

Preattentive stage

Answer 13

Automatic and rapid stage of processing, proposed by feature integration theory, during which a stimulus is decompose into individual features.

Question 14

Focused attention stage

Answer 14

This stage of processing in feature integration theory in which the features are combined. This stage requires focused attention.

Question 15

Illusionary conjunctions

Answer 15

Illusionary combination of features that are perceived when stimuli containing a number of features are presented briefly and under conditions in which focused attention is difficult. For example, presenting a red square in the blue triangle could potentially create the perception of the red triangle.

Question 16

Balint’s syndrome

Answer 16

Condition resulting from damage to a person’s parietal lobe. One characteristic of the syndrome is an inability to focus attention on individual objects.

Question 17

Visual search

Answer 17

Procedure in which a person’s task is to find a particular element in a display that contains a number of elements.

Question 18

Feature search

Answer 18

Visual search task in which a person can find a target by searching for only one feature. An example would be looking for a horizontal green line among vertical green lines.

Question 19

Conjunction search

Answer 19

Visual search task in which it is necessary to search for a combination (or conjunction) of two or more features on the same stimulus to find the target. An example of a conjunction search would be looking for a horizontal green line among vertical green lines and horizontal red lines.

Question 20

Synchrony hypothesis

Answer 20

Idea that when an object causes neurons in different parts of the cortex to fire, the timing of the firing of these neurons will be synchronized. The synchrony indicates that all of these neurons are responding to the same object. This idea has been proposed as a solution to the binding problem.

Question 21

Synchrony

Answer 21

Described in the synchrony hypothesis, two neurons or groups of neurons are firing in synchrony when they had the same pattern of firing.