Attention Flashcards
Change blindness
Difficulty noticing a relatively large change in the stimulus
Attentional blink
A temporal limit to sustained attention
Failure to fully process information presented during a brief time
window following attended information
Overt attention
Associated with eye movements to the specific location that you are attending to
Fixation
position of gaze is maintained at the same location –> visual
information from the fixated location is processed by the fovea
Saccade
fast shift in gaze position
Covert attention
Paying attention to a specific
location without moving your eyes
to that location
Endogenous attention
Allocated voluntarily to specific
aspects of the environment
according to instructions/cues,
goals, expectations
Exogenous attention
Allocated automatically in
response to a salient or
novel stimulus
Posner cuing paradigm
Cue can orient endogenous (A) or exogenous (B) attention
Object- or feature-based attention
Allocation of attention to a
particular object or feature, rather than a particular spatial location
Brain regions involved in attention orienting & control
include
multiple areas that form frontoparietal networks, notably the
Intra-Parietal Sulcus/Superior Parietal Lobule (IPS/SPL) and
the Frontal Eye Fields (FEFs)
Dorsal attention network
Engages and directs goal-
oriented, top-down attention
to specific locations or features, brain activity during cues,
before the stimulus appears
(~endogenous attention)
Ventral attention network
Automatic, bottom-up
reorienting of attention to
unexpected or salient stimuli
shift attention, Brain activity when attention is
reflexively directed
(~exogenous attention)
Dorsal Attention Network
Goal-directed, top-down, voluntary control of visuospatial attention
* Includes the intraparietal sulcus/superior parietal lobule (IPS/SPL) & Frontal Eye Fields (FEFs)
Ventral Attention Network
interacts with D-FPN as a bottom-up “circuitbreaker” to automatically redirect (shift) attention to salient, novel, or relevant stimuli
(e.g., invalidly cued targets, unfrequent targets) * Includes: temporoparietal junction (TPJ),inferior frontal cortex
Central Executive Network
The DAN/D-FPN partly overlaps with the Frontoparietal control
network, which is involved in top-down, task-related executive
control of attention, High level, goal-oriented “management” of attention to “stay
on task”
* Not just visuospatial: multimodal, also thoughts, memories
Spatial neglect syndrome
Characterized by difficulty paying attention to a location in space
(usually one side or another of the visual field = hemi-neglect), Associated with lesions to
the parietal lobe,
particularly in the right
hemisphere
