Attention Flashcards
What are the three networks of attention?
Orienting
Alerting
Executive
Orienting
Drawing attention to a region
Early-emerging and most primitive
Fully operational in infancy and little subsequent change
Involves cortical brain regions (superior parietal lobes and frontal eye fields) and subcortical regions (superior colliculus and pulvinar nucleus)
Infancy to first 6 months
Early improvements in attention
Saccadic movements (jumpy) (subcortical control) emerge before smooth pursuit
Sticky/obligatory attention is common at 1 month - struggle to disengage once attending to something
Between 2-6 months, increase in smooth pursuits and ability to anticipate move nests rather than lagging behind (looking ahead rather than follow movement)
Orienting tasks
A stimulus is presented centrally that would be a cue another stimuli was going to appear on one side of the screen
To test if they had learnt the cue and therefore could predict the side the image would appear they presented a black screen and tracked the infants eye movements - found that they could orient to the correct side if the screen based on expectations of spaciotemporal associations
4 months successful
Johnson, Posner and Rothbart (1991)
Disengagement trials
Show stimulus and then another one to the side of it and measure time taken to disengage attention to new stimulus
4 months old successful
Johnson, Posner and Rothbart (1991)
Alerting
Arousing the attentional system through a cue that indicates both that a stimulus is about to occur and includes some information about target
Present in infancy but undergoes refinement through early primary years (e.g., response times to cues improve through 10 years)
More prominent in left hemisphere, especially in frontal and parietal areas and in thalamus
Associated with norepinephrine
Alerting task
Can take any form
A stimulus e,g sound indicates something is about to happen
Speed of response improves with alerting cue - they look toward stimuli quicker
Executive attention/executive functioning
Executive Function: collection of cognitive activities involved in goal-directed tasks and problem-solving
Includes inhibitory control, error correcting/shifting, working memory
Attentional control task
Attending to certain aspects that are relevant and ignoring irrelevant stimuli
Asked to identify the direction of the middle arrow – the surrounding arrows are irrelevant but are distracting when they give you contradicting information
Particpants are faster when the surrounding arrows are concealed
You can adapt the study with different images for children e.g fish
People are slower for non match too
Child stroop task
Child version involves showing the child a picture e.g sun and asking them to say night and vice versa for moon.
When you ask them to respond after showing the picture they don’t think and respond automatically with the congruent word whereas when you ask them to first think to themselves they are more accurate
Training EF
Based on a similar premise of asking them to pause and reflect
Called dimensional change card sort task
Two boxes and given cards
Asked to sort based on colour or shape
Reflection on what you know and how it related to the problem benefits executive functioning
In some cases you can see transfer – helps them across different tasks
Inhibitory control
Stopping yourself responding automatically
Marshmallow task – asked to wait to do something they really want to do in order to get a bigger reward at the end
Theres a lot of individual differences in this kind of inhibition
Harder for younger children to do it
Different techniques used by children e.g dancing ton distract themselves, not looking at it, touching it and licking fingers
Attention network test
Combines all three attentional systems into one task
Measure how relation times differ in all these different cases
Alerting – the cue is either present or not but doesn’t orient the stimuli
Orienting – if your oriental system is fully developed you’ll be faster at spatial cue trials
Conflict – faster at congruent
Looked at performance on these different tasks at different ages and how it related to behaviour and temperament
Individual differences
Perceptual Sensitivity: “detection of slight, low intensity environmental stimuli”
Duration of orienting: “Attention to and/or interaction with a single object for extended periods of time”
Found positive correlations with both of these and the alerting system
Orienting system – positive associations with approach and smoothability
Exectutuve functioning - negative correlations – 7 year olds who showed faster response time on the congruent relative to the incongruent trails showed lower rates of smiling and laughter, vocal recativity and cuddliness
They found differential relations between different aspects of temperament and different attentional systems between 7 months and 7 years of age
Newborn visual attention and subsequent temperament
Newborn attention is measured using dwell time - duration that gaze remains upon individual stimuli
Temperament at 7.5 years is measured using:
effortful control - ability to regulate emotions and inhibit dominant response in order to activate subdominant response
Surgency - high levels of extraversion, motor activity and impulsivity correlates with aggression and externalising behaviour problems in early childhood
Behavioural difficulties - hyperactivity, inattention, conduct problems, emotional symptoms, peer problems
Infants with longer dwell times -> lower surgency scores and bd
