6 Visual Attention Flashcards
Divided attention
Directing attention to a number of things at once.
Attention
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.
Fixation
Pause of the eye that occurs between eye movements as a person scans is seen.
Saccades
Small, rapid eye movement.
Stimulus salience
Characteristics such as bright colors, high contrast, and highly visible orientations that cause stimuli to stand out and therefore attract attention.
Saliency map
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.
Selective attention
Focusing attention on specific objects and ignoring others.
Inattentional blindness
Situation in which a stimulus that is not intended to is not perceived, even though the person is looking directly at it.
Change blindness
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.
Precueing
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.
Binding
Process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object.
Binding problem
Problem of how neural activity of many separated areas in the brain is combined to create a perception of a coherent object.
Feature integration theory
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.
Preattentive stage
Automatic and rapid stage of processing, proposed by feature integration theory, during which a stimulus is decompose into individual features.
Focused attention stage
This stage of processing in feature integration theory in which the features are combined. This stage requires focused attention.
Illusionary conjunctions
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.
Balint’s syndrome
Condition resulting from damage to a person’s parietal lobe. One characteristic of the syndrome is an inability to focus attention on individual objects.
Visual search
Procedure in which a person’s task is to find a particular element in a display that contains a number of elements.
Feature search
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.
Conjunction search
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.
Synchrony hypothesis
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.
Synchrony
Described in the synchrony hypothesis, two neurons or groups of neurons are firing in synchrony when they had the same pattern of firing.
