Attention and perception part 2 unit 6 Flashcards
What research methods does cognitive psychology primarily use to study human cognition?
Cognitive psychology uses behavioral evidence, such as accuracy and reaction time, to understand cognitive processes.
Give an example of a cognitive psychology experiment related to visual search.
Participants search for a target (e.g., an “O”) among distractors. Reaction times differ based on whether the target has a distinctive feature, showing how feature distinctiveness affects visual search.
What distinguishes cognitive neuroscience from cognitive psychology?
Cognitive neuroscience combines behavioral evidence with brain activity measurements to understand human cognition.
Name three tools used in cognitive neuroscience to measure brain activity.
EEG (Electroencephalography): Detects electrical activity at the scalp.
fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging): Measures changes in blood oxygenation.
PET (Positron Emission Tomography): Tracks glucose consumption in the brain.
How might cognitive neuroscience study the brain regions involved in visual search?
Participants complete a visual search task while their brain activity is measured using tools like EEG or fMRI to identify regions involved in detecting a target.
What does neuropsychology study, and how does it obtain evidence?
Neuropsychology studies cognition using evidence from patients with brain damage to understand how different brain regions relate to cognitive processes.
What did Shallice and Warrington’s (1970) case study of Patient KF reveal about memory?
Patient KF’s brain damage impaired short-term memory (STM) but left long-term memory (LTM) intact, suggesting STM and LTM are separable cognitive processes relying on different brain regions.
What is spatial neglect, and what causes it?
Spatial neglect (or hemi-neglect) is an attention impairment where patients ignore one side of their visual field, typically caused by brain damage in one cerebral hemisphere, most often the right hemisphere.
Which brain regions are associated with neglect symptoms?
Neglect is often linked to damage in the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes, as well as the basal ganglia, especially in the right hemisphere.
Why is neglect considered an attention impairment and not a sensory impairment?
Neglect patients can perceive stimuli in either visual field when presented alone but ignore stimuli in the contralateral field when competing stimuli are present, showing it’s an issue of attention, not sensory function.
What behaviors are seen in neglect patients beyond vision?
Patients may:
Ignore the left side of their body or objects.
Fail to respond to sounds or touches on the left side.
Dress or groom only the right side of their body.
What tests are used to diagnose spatial neglect?
Line Bisection Test: Patients bisect a horizontal line but place the midpoint farther right.
Drawing Tasks: Patients copy images but omit details on the neglected side.
What phenomenon demonstrates neglect in memory?
In the Bisiach and Luzzatti (1977) study, neglect patients described only one side of a familiar scene but could describe the neglected side when asked to imagine the scene from another perspective.
What is extinction, and how does it relate to neglect?
Extinction occurs when patients can detect a single stimulus in either visual field but fail to notice a contralateral stimulus when one is presented in both fields simultaneously.
What did Posner’s experiments reveal about neglect?
Neglect patients struggle with disengaging attention from the ipsilateral field and shifting it back to the contralateral field, especially in invalid cue trials.
