Attention and Consciousness Flashcards
What is attention - At the psychological level?
Preferential allocation of processing resources to specific environmental stimuli
What is attention - At the neural level?
Alternations in the selectivity, intensity, and duration of neuronal responses to those stimuli
Structure analogies: Filing Cabinet
The hippocampus
Structure Analogies: Reward/Prize
Nucleus Accumbens
Structure analogies: Long-term storage
Neocortex
Structure analogies: Alarm
Amygdala
Alertness
Basic requirement of being alert/awake
Selective attention
Ability to select relevant stimuli from the environment
- Mental spotlight focuses conscious awareness on limited aspect
Vigilance/Sustained attention
Ability to sustain attention in the face of distractors
Divided Attention
Ability to split attention towards multiple stimuli in parallel
Overt and Covert Shifts of attention
- We often consciously associate changes in the focus of our spotlight as involving the movement of our eyes
- not actually necessary
Top-Down vs Bottom-up attention
- Bottom-up are “sensory first”
- Top-down are “brain first”
- Influence each other
- Not a matter of which, so much as when and in which direction
Vigilance can be: _______ or ___________-specific
Stimuli or person-specific
Vigilance: Stimulus example
Think about sustained attention for something
e.g. social media
Vigilance: Person-Specific example
ADHD children have challenging time remaining vigilant in the face of any distractor
or
Anxious individuals show greater vigilance for anxiety approaching stimuli
How is divided attention often assessed?
Dichotic listening tasks
Are perception and consciousness the same thing?
No
Inattentional Blindness
Much information that enters our perception never makes it way into consciousness
Change blindness - Example study
While a man provides directions to construction worker, two experimenters rudely pass between carrying a door, man switches out
50% of people do not notice the switch
Blindsight
- Cortically blind due to extensive damage to V1
- patients can report above chance bright lights or shapes, they can’t actually report having seen
- Do not have access to visual perception, but will give the correct answer
- Perceive left and right separately
Visual system: Low road
- Evolutionarily primitive
- Simple
- reflexive
- Faster
Visual System: High road
- Evolutionarily newer
- More complicated
- Less reflexive
- This is what is damaged in blindsight
Standard “high road” visual processing stream
Dorsal/Ventral pathway
Primitive, low-road processing stream
reticular activating system
Subliminal processing
- Stimuli we do not see, still get in
- Blindsight is the opposite of this
Blindsight is evidence of what?
Attention and consciousness are not the same thing
What is consciousness?
Strange paradox, hard to define
- Definition relates to state or content
State of consciousness
Relates to “what IS consciousness”
Philosophy, psychology, perhaps neuroscience
Content of consciousness
Relates to “what REACHES consciousness”
Cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience
Does all brain activity stop when unconscious?
No
in fact, some brain regions activate and increase when unconcsious
What areas are active when unconscious?
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
Posterior parietal cortex
Medial frontal cortex
Posterior cingulate
Training phase - Study
- Showed coma pts. Images, ask them to adjust brain activity based on stimuli
- If red square, do this, blink eye (can’t actually blink eye, but motor cortex that could activate successfully
- Yes region, no region, ask questions
Quality of consciousness
Potential objective qualities of individual stimuli
Qualia of Consciousness
Subjective quality of individual experience
e.g. way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose
