Attention Flashcards
What is attention?
The brain’s method of selection. Once an object is selected it can be processed more thoroughly.
What are the 2 types of attention?
Exogenous - relies on external information that stands out to us. There is automatic control of attention by the characteristics of the stimulus.
Endogenous - top down, depending on task rules or responses, regulating attention patterns based on information that is already known. Driven by a person’s intentions and interests in the moment.
How do attention processes work in the brain?
Alerting - first system telling you to start paying attention - brain stem.
Orienting - for exogenous processing - ventral fusiform cortex, temporal parietal junction.
Executive control - fronto-parietal control system.
What happens to attention as age increases?
Endogenous attention decreases.
Why does endogenous attention decline as we age?
Due to pre-frontal cortex decline. Emotion related attention shows a slower decrease.
When does emotion related attention stay intact?
This seems to be valence dependent: if we have a positive memory with something the memory takes longer to decline.
What is the bottle neck model of attention?
Filter theory: input enters though ears, there is a very early sensory buffer, you choose to attend to certain characteristics, other information blocked out, meaning is extracted and information goes into STM. Broadbent, 1958
What is the dichotic listening task?
1 sound played into one ear, a different sound played into the other ear - person asked to repeat one of the sounds and ignore the other one.
What is the cocktail party phenomenon?
Highly salient information can still be picked up even in a loud environment where there are a lot of conversations going on.
What amendments were made to the filter theory?
The intensity of the irrelevent information is diminished but not eliminated. - Treisman, 1960.
There can be late selection, which is where the attention filter occurs later in the processing stream, after the semantic analysis (not before like in early selection). - Deutsch, 1963.
What are the different sequences of early and late selection?
Early - stimuli -> awareness and response -> semantic analysis.
Late - stimuli -> semantic analysis -> awareness and response.
What is a visual search?
A perceptual task where participants actively scan the environment for a target object among other objects. Used to measure two paradigms - feature and conjunction search.
What is a feature search?
A paradigm for assessing attention. Looking for a certain feature
- not affected by distractors
- dependent on feature saliency
- bottom-up processing
- conducted in parallel (can take everything in all in one look)
- stable reaction times even when number of items increases.
What is a conjunction search?
A paradigm for assessing attention. Other factors influence.
- affected by distractors
- bottom-up and top-down processing
- attention needed
- conducted in a serial manner
- reaction time is always higher than in a feature search, and increases as number of items increases.
What else influences conjunction search?
- set size
- presence or absence of target
- features and target similarity
- distractor heterogeneity
