Attention and Performance Flashcards
Tell me about the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC)
Active when people must monitor conflict (e.g. at the Stroop color task)
It appears that children develop more cognitive control as their ACC develops.
Positive correlation between performance and sheer volume of the ACC.
It’s located in the prefrontal cortex and involved in executive control.
What is Attention
The allocation of cognitive resources among ongoing processes.
Attention is the process of selecting certain information and therefore also discarding other information.
Tell me about Attenuation Theory
Treismanns filter theory
When you attend to one thing, all other stimuli attenuates/weakens. You don’t completely block out unattended stimulus, but weaken it.
It’s a modification of the filter theory (early-selection theory)
E.g. The Cocktail Party Effect.
What is Automaticity
Doing something automatically.
Action doesn’t require attention to do the action, but it requires attention to inhibit it.
Expertise through practice.
What is the Binding Problem
The question of how the brain puts together features in the visual field to produce perception of an object.
We must focus our attention on a stimulus before being able to put its features together (object-based attention)
What is a Central Bottleneck
The inability of central cognition to pursue multiple lines of thought simultaneously.
So just a bottleneck in the central cognition.
What is the Dichotic Listening Task
A task in which participants in an experiment are presented with two messages simultaneously, one to each ear, and are instructed to repeat back the words from only one of the messages (shadowing)
Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC)
Important in the setting of intentions and the control of behavior. Important region in the prefrontal area in executive control. Highly active when doing two tasks simultaneously.
Helps inhibiting actions.
Early-selection Theories
Theories of attention proposing that serial bottlenecks occur early in information processing.
(Broadbent, 1958) a filter occurs before we perceive (entire) stimulus, we use physical characteristics (e.g. pitch) to select which message to listen to.
(Treisman, 1964) attenuation theory, certain messages will be attenuated (weakened) but not tuned out completely.
Executive Control
The direction of central cognition, which is carried out mainly by prefrontal regions of the brain.
You take control of your central cognition and decide where to bring your attention (Goal-directed attention)
Feature-integration Theory
You must focus your attention on a stimulus in order to bind (synthesize) the features together in the right way.
The answer to the binding problem.
Filter Theory
(Broadbent,1958) Sensory information comes through the system until a bottleneck is reached. At that point, a person can choose what message to attend to based physical characteristic (e.g. pitch or loudness of the speaker’s voice)
Early-selection theory, not backed up, scientifically as much as the attenuation theory.
Goal-directed Attention
What we look at if there’s a goal or an object that’ll direct our attention, but important stimulus can disrupt our goals (endogenous control, top-down process, active & intentional)
Illusory Conjunction
When features from different objects are mistakenly combined.
Related to the binding problem.
Inattentional Blindness
We are often unaware of changes in our visual field if we are not paying attention to it.
(Gorilla video, Whodunnit)
Inhibition of Return
When we move our eyes from point A to point B, it takes more time to move our eyes back to point A compared to moving them to a new point, point C
Your perception is biased, and in general is more fond of looking to a new object than going back to look at an old object.
Object based and not location based.
Late-selection Theories
A filter occurs after we have perceived the stimuli.
(Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963) information is processed without attenuation, but we can only shadow one message at a time.
Not backed up, scientifically as much as the attenuation theory.
Object-based Attention
People focus their attention on particular objects rather than regions of space.
(example with the counting of bumps if part of the same object)
Perfect time-sharing
When participants’ times are nearly unaffected by the requirement of doing two tasks at once after some practice.
(An example of how multitasking could work)
Serial Bottleneck
Points at which it’s no longer possible to continue processing in parallelism in the motor system.
When there’s a bottleneck, our cognition must select which to attend to and which to ignore.
So a serial bottleneck is a bottleneck in a specific system/module. E.g. auditory system.
Space-based Attention
People allocate their attention to a region of space.
Visual attention directed toward locations independent of what objects are present.
Stimulus-driven Attention
What our attention is initially drawn to, so what grabs our attention (exogenous control, bottom-up process, passive & incidental)
Could be all of the different systems.
Stroop Effect
The very-known test, where you try to say the color of a word – and it displays how it is very difficult to say a color of a word if the meaning of the word is contradicting the color you are supposed to say – this is because we have gotten so automatized (expertise through practice) with reading, that we can’t help ourselves reading the word.
people with damage in their right parietal lobe have difficulty seeing what kind of patterns?
Global patterns
people with damage in their left parietal lobe have difficulty seeing what kind of patterns?
local patterns
what kind of attention is displayed in the cocktail party effect
stimulus driven attention
Attention
the selection of certain input for further processing, while neglecting other input
automaticity
when central cogniton is no longer involved in initiating an action
how many degrees can humans shift their attention from the eyes’ fixation point.
24 degrees
Attenuation theory
one part of the input is enhanced, while the processing of other input is reduced
