Attention

Question 1

Limited resources

Answer 1

Attention has been described as a spotlight, which switches around depending on what captures our attention, therefore it is limited and can only do one thing at a time

Question 2

Method of information filtering

Answer 2

There is an infinite amount of information that we can attend to, parietal lobe filters this and directs attention to important things

Question 3

Treisman’s Attentuation Model

Answer 3

Has attenuating filter and hierarchy of analysers

Question 4

Shadowing task

Answer 4

Participants heard one thing in one ear and one thing in another and were able to attend to one specific ear and hear the message

Question 5

Cocktail party effect

Answer 5

When you hear your name or something relevant to you, you find yourself paying attention to the conversation, even if previously you couldn’t hear anything they were saying

Question 6

Endogenous

Answer 6

Cognitive phenomena originating from within the body (central, symbolic cues)

Question 7

Exogenous

Answer 7

Phenomena which originate outside the body (spatial, peripheral)

Question 8

Inattentional blindness

Answer 8

It is easy to miss something that you are not looking for (the invisible gorilla - Simons & Chabris, 1999)

Question 9

Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA)

Answer 9

Time between the onset of first stimulus and onset of a second stimulus

Question 10

Inter-stimulus interval (ISI)

Answer 10

Time between offset of first stimulus and onset of second stimulus

Question 11

Inhibition of return

Answer 11

Helps to facilitate attention switching to other aspects of the visual array, being slower to respond to a target at a cued location after a delay

Question 12

What is the Navon task?

Answer 12

Big letters made out of small letters and participants are asked to either identify the small letters of the large one

Question 13

What does the Navon task assess?

Answer 13

Spatial processing

Attention spotlight can widen or narrow depending on the task we are doing

Question 14

What are the two types of spatial processing?

Answer 14

Global and local

Question 15

What is the Stroop task?

Answer 15

Participants are presented with words written in colours and they are asked to say the word, or the colour that the word is written in

Question 16

What does the Stroop task assess?

Answer 16

How the attention system integrates features

Question 17

What is the visual search task?

Answer 17

Participants are asked to search for a letter in a visual array of letters

Question 18

What is a parallel search?

Answer 18

Features of the target are different from the distractor items, so you search the whole array simultaneously

Question 19

What is a conjunctive search?

Answer 19

Searching through each letter individually as the target is similar to the distractors

Question 20

How can eye-tracking be used to investigate attention?

Answer 20

Eye-tracking shows where on an image people pay attention, the more fixated they are on a part, the more attention they are paying and the more interested they are

Question 21

What does the visual search task assess?

Answer 21

How the attention system integrates features

Question 22

Barron, Riby, Greer and Smallwood (2011) - mind wandering

Answer 22

Participants were asked to respond to rare target event (red circle) that appeared in a series of other stimuli (green and blue squares)
Green were presented frequently, blue were presented as much as the red circle
Increase in parietal cortex neuron activity shown about 300-500ms after red
Similar increase shown in frontal lobe after blue
Ppts completed a survey about mind wandering and were separated into high . medium and low mind wandering
Subjects in the high group showed less frontal and parietal cortex activity when the red circle and blue square were shown
Supports idea that when the mind is wandering, the subjects were not paying attention to anything, not that they were being distracted

Question 23

What would show distraction from the current task?

Answer 23

Higher frontal cortex activity when blue squares were shown

Question 24

Dunn, Freeth & Milne (2016)

Answer 24

Participants passively watched a screen and asked if blue t was inverted or upright
Two groups, high and low autism quotient
High AQ’s N2pc component is much larger than those who scored low on AQ
High AQ participants were processing even irrelevant information strongly, supressing distracting information was harder for high AQ participants

Question 25

Luck et al. (2000)

Answer 25

Subjects fixate on a central cross and attend to either left or right visual field
Stimuli are then presented to the left and right visual fields in a rapid sequence
ERP elicited by left visual field stimulus contains a larger P1 and N1 component the stimulus is attended to (‘attend left’) than when ignored (‘attend right’)

Question 26

What is the N2pc and what does it mean?

Answer 26

The N2pc is a component of a ERP linked to selective attention
The larger the N2pc, the more effortful the processing is