Attention week 3

Question 1

What are the 4 main types of attention?

Answer 1

• Arousal
• Sustained
• Selective
• Divided

Question 2

What brain area is involved in overall arousal?

Answer 2

• Ascending reticular activating system (RAS)

Damage results in a coma

Question 3

What are the 5 brain areas involved in selective attention ?

Answer 3

• Superior colliculus involved in bottom-up and top-down control of eye movements
• Thalamus Gating of sensory information: filters incoming information before sending it to cortical regions
• Superior parietal lobe: shifting attention & top-down control
• Inferior parietal lobe: bottom-up attention
• Intraparietal sulcus: integration of bottom-up and top-down information

Question 4

Brain network for Divided attention?

Answer 4

• Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex important for multi-tasking
  Alternative view: prefrontal cortex generally involved in response to increased task difficulty

Question 5

What is Balint’s Syndrome?

Answer 5

• Following bilateral damage to occipital and parietal cortex, patients with Balint’s syndrome are unable to attend to more than one object at a time, or to localise objects in space

Question 6

What are the 2 types of activation that we see in ADHD?

Answer 6

Hypoactivation in systems involved in executive function (frontoparietal network) and attention (ventral attentional network)
Hyperactivation in the default mode network