Attention Flashcards
Bottom-up Attention
-Stimuli guided automatic attention
-Physical stimuli and salience
-Somehting you give attention automatically to without thinking about it
-E.g. ambulance sirens
-Temporoparietal junction + Ventral frontal cortex
Top-down Attention
-Observer guided controlled attention
-A goal or target in mind directs your attention
-You want to pay attention to somethng -> determines what you will focus on
-E.g. I want a burito!
-Intraparietal sulcus/ Intraparietal lobule
-Frontal eye fields
Arousal
-Alertness and Awareness
-Excitement = best arousal
Endogenous Attention
-When an individual chooses what to pay attention to (goals + intentions)
-Top-down processing
-Intraparietal sulcus
-Voluntary
-You’re giving attention to something
Exogenous Attention
-When stimuli in the environment drives us to pay attention
-Bottom-up processing
-Temporo-parietal junction + VFC
-Involuntary
-Something catches your attention
Spatial Neglect
-Damage to the right hemisphere, ventral parietal cortex
-Cannot attend to information present to the opposite side of lesion
-Left side of the world is out of awareness
-E.g. reads only words on the right side/ eats from one side of the plate/ can only describe half of the scene from their memory
Top-down Attention : Sustained Attention
-Maintain focus on one input for a long period of time
-The ability to focus on one task
-Vigilance or concentration
-E.g. People bird watching
Top-down Attention : Divided Attention
-Shifting attentional focus between tasks
-The ability to attend to more than one task
-Multi-tasking
-E.g. Watching TV, while working on computer, while texting
Top-down Attention : Selective Attention
-Focus on one input and ignore other information
-E.g. Choosing to tune out your friend yapping on the phone and focus on your TV show
Theory of Selective Attention : Broadbent’s Early Selection Filter Model
-You filter information at the level of perception, before information is processed for meaning (semantic analysis)
-Anything that doesn’t pass through filter comes back to sensory buffer and rapidly decays
-Selected information is processed for meaning, enters awareness
-Information not selected by the filter decays and is not processed for meaning
Dichotic Listening Tasks
-Present 2 simultaneous messages to each ear
-Participants better to recall ear by ear than the simultaneous message
-E.g. better remembering 2,5,6 and 8,4,1 (change from ear-to-ear, not shifting filter) than 2,8; 5,4; 6,1 (pair-by-pair, shifting filters)
Dichotic Listening : Shadowing Tasks
-People do not remember the content of an unattended message, but they notice some sensory features
-Evidence that unattended information is not processed for meaning but perception
Evidence Against Early Selection
-In certain situations, unattended information can ‘‘break through’’
-At a party, you can attend to one conversation, yet hear your name if spoken in a non-attended-to conversation
-E.g. participants presented with a word (apple) paired with a shock in pre-shadowing task phase / shadowing task with the ‘shocked’ word in unattended ear / Increased skin conductance when the ‘shocked’ word was presented in the unattended ear
Theory of Selective Attention: Treisman’s Attenuator Model
-An early filter dials down the influence of unattended material
-Some aspects of unattended material to be processed for meaning
-Turns dial down on things you don’t want to pay attention to
-But, if there is something really important in unattended information, it will still pass through even with volume down
Theory of Selective Attention: Late Selection Filter Models
-We process input to the level of the meaning, and then select what we want to process further
-E.g. Stroop Task
-For the interference effect to occur on the Stroop task, you must process the written colour name (unattended information) for meaning
Controlled Tasks
-Those that require effort and voluntary top-down attention
-Stroop : naming the colour of the ‘ink’
Automatic Tasks
-Those that are highly familiar and well-practiced and do not require voluntary top-down attention
-Stroop : reading colour names (does not require accessing meaning)
Theory of Selective Attention : The Load Theory
-Attentional filtering (selection) can occur at different points of processing
-Filter processing will depend on how much of your resources are required for your current task
-low resource load (task not difficult), process non-attended information to a later stage
-high resource load (task very difficult), process non-attended information at an early stage
A difficult task with a high load
-We process all information (relevant and irrelevant) only to the level of perception
-Our attention is selected early
-Focused attention
-E.g. I have never seen Harry Potter
An easier task with a low load
-We process all information (relevant and irrelevant) to the level of meaning
-Our attention is selected later
-Process irrelevant information for meaning
-E.g. I have watched Jurassic Park many times
Way to define load : Central Resource Capacity
-One resource pool from which all attention resources all allocated
-Load in attended sense will determine distractor processing across all senses
-Driving simulator task under two conditions
-Low (auditory) load, driving with no radio
-High (auditory) load, driving and listening to the radio
-Did you see the elephant?
Ways to define load : Multiple Resource Capacity
-Multiple resources from which attention resources are allocated
-Attention depend on the match between relevant and irrelevant (distracting) information
-If you are driving and need to get directions, would you have more problems
-Paying attention to the road is listening to a set of directions
-Viewing your phone
