Attention

Question 1

Visual Extinction

Answer 1

Damage to right parietal lobe

Can see stimulus on the left if there is no other competitoin (frog and sun example)

Question 2

Ways to Bias Competition

Answer 2

Attentional Enhancement
Filter Out Distractors
Increase baseline activity
Stimulus characteristics

Question 3

Inattentional Blindness:

Answer 3

• Failure to be aware of a visual stimulus because attention is directed away from it
i.e. Not noticing gorilla because you’re attending to the number of basketball passes

Question 4

Change Blindness:

Answer 4

• Failure to notice the appearance/disappearance of objects between 2 alternating images
i.e. Appearance of an object in a scene

Question 5

Convert orienting

Answer 5

Moving attention without moving eyes or head

Question 6

Overt orienting

Answer 6

Moving eyes or head along with the focus of attention

Question 7

Exogenous Orienting

Answer 7

Attention guided externally by a stimulus

i.e. see flashing light, attention directed there, RT is faster when stimulus is presented there

Question 8

Inhibition of return

Answer 8

□ Slowing of reaction time associated with going back to a previously attended location

□ With longer delays, participants are slower at detecting a target in the same location as the cue
Attention initially shifts to cued location, but then shifts to another location (disengagement)

Question 9

Endogenous Orienting

Answer 9

Attention is guided by the goals of the perceiver

• Participants asked to attend to either the central letter or the whole word
	§ When attending to the central letter, participants were faster at making judgments about that letter, but not other letter in the word
	§ When attending to the whole word, faster at making judgments about all the letters  Top down influences- attention can be manipulated by the demands of the task

Question 10

Visual Search:

Answer 10

• Task of detecting the presence of absence of a target object (i.e. “F”) in an array of other distracting objects (“E”, “T”)
Good example of both bottom up processing (perceptual identification of objects and features) and top down processing (using target to endogenously orient attention)

Question 11

Saccade

Answer 11

Fast, ballistic movement of the eyes

Question 12

Lateral Intraparietal Area (LIP):

Answer 12

• Region in the posterior parietal lobe that response to external sensory stimuli (i.e. vision, sound) and elicits a motor response (i.e. eye movements)

Neurons in this region increase activity to both endogenous (target enters receptive field) and exogenous (sudden changes in illumination) orienting

Multisensory part of teh brain

Question 13

Dorso-dorsal Stream

Answer 13

§ Orienting within a salience map
§ Involves LIP and Frontal Eye Field (FEF)
□ Part of the frontal lobes responsible for voluntary movement of the eyes
§ Strong activity in LIP in response to a cue

Question 14

Ventro-dorsal branch

Answer 14

§ Circuit breaker that interrupts ongoing cognitive activity to direct attention outside the current focus
§ Strongly right lateralized to right temporoparietal region
§ Activity found when detecting a target (but not when a spatial cue)
Activity enhanced when detecting an infrequent target in an unattended location

Question 15

Non-Spatial Deficits From Parietal Lobe Lesions:

Answer 15

• Both hemispheres are involved in detecting salient stimuli, damaging one hemisphere depletes this resource

• Left and right parietal lobes have different roles in non-spatial attention
        - Right= salient stimuli, left= suppression of non-salient stimuli

Question 16

Phenomenal consciousness

Answer 16

Experience of perceiving something

Question 17

Access consciousness

Answer 17

Ability to report on the content of awareness

Question 18

Feature Integration Theory (FIT):

Answer 18

Spatial attention

Early selection

If distractors have the same features as the target, take longer to process because need to integrate features

Question 19

Illusory conjunctions

Answer 19

§ Situation in which visual features of 2 different objects are incorrectly perceived as being associated with a single object
□ Individual features incorrectly combined
§ i.e. Participants say they saw a red “H” when they actually saw a blue “H” and a red “E” when stimuli are presented quickly (can’t perform serial search)

Question 20

FIT and parietal lobe

Answer 20

• TMS applied over the parietal lobe slows conjunction searches, but not single-feature searches
§ Patients with parietal lesions often show a high level of conjunction errors
Suggests parietal lobe is important for FIT

Question 21

Negative priming effect

Answer 21

§ Participants must name the red object and ignore the blue one
§ If the ignored object on one trial suddenly becomes the attended object in the second trial, participants are slower at naming it
§ Same effect is found if the critical object is from the same semantic category
□ Suggests that the ignored object was processes meaningfully rather than being excluded purely on the basis of its colour as would be expected by early section theories such as FIT

Question 22

Biased Competition Theory

Answer 22

Attention is a broad set of mechanisms for reducing many inputs to limited outcomes

Competition occurs at multiple stages
i.e. familarity of object, top down signaling, salience of object..etc

Question 23

Premotor Theory of Attention:

Answer 23

• Assumes that the orienting of attention is nothing more than preparation of motor actions
Theory of spatial attention

If attention drawn to one area, then have to shift it, requires more neural resources and therefore slower RT

Question 24

Balint’s Syndrome:

Answer 24

Severe difficulty in spatial processing following bilateral lesions of the parietal lobe

Question 25

Simultanagnosia

Answer 25

□ Inability to perceive more than one object at a time
□ i.e. See window, then window disappears, see a necklace, can’t see whose wearing it
Can see as single object at a time

Question 26

Optic ataxia

Answer 26

Problems using vision to guide hand actions

Question 27

Optic apraxia

Answer 27

Problems making appropriate eye movements

Question 28

Egocentric Space:

Answer 28

• Map of space coded relative to the position of the body
• Main features of neglect tend to relate to this kind of space
Linked to damage to the right temporoparietal region