Chapter 3: Attention and Performance Flashcards
Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)
Book definition: “Medial portion of the prefrontal cortex important in control and dealing with conflict. (p. 75)”
Attention
Book definition: “The allocation of cognitive resources among ongoing processes. (p. 54)”
Attenuation theory
Book definition: “Treisman’s theory of attention, which proposes that we weaken some incoming sensory signals on the basis of their physical characteristics. (p. 56)”
Automaticity
Book definition: “The ability to perform a task with little or no central cognitive control. (p. 72)”
Binding problem
Book definition: “The question of how the brain determines which features in the visual field go together to form an object. (p. 63)”
Central bottleneck
Book definition: “The inability of central cognition to pursue multiple lines of thought simultaneously. Contrast with perfect time-sharing. (p. 72)”
Dichotic listening task
Book definition: “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 them. (p. 54)”
The repetition of the presented words is also called ‘speech shadowing’. Experiments have shown that participants are not only able to do this, but also follow a meaningful message jumping between ears. This suggests that people can use selective attention to follow both physical characteristics, like a particular ear, as well as semantic characteristics, like a meaningful message.
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)
Book definition: “Upper portion of the prefrontal cortex thought to be important in cognitive control. (p. 75)”
Early-selection theory
Book definition: “A theory of attention stating that serial bottlenecks occur early in information processing. Contrast with late-selection theory. (p. 54)”
Executive control
Book definition: “The direction of central cognition, which is carried out mainly by prefrontal regions of the brain. (p. 75)”
Feature-integration theory
Book definition: “Treisman’s proposal that one must focus attention on a set of features before the individual features can be synthesized into a pattern. (p. 63)”
The feature-integration theory suggests that features such as color, orientation and depth are registered early, automatically and in parallel, while objects are identified separately and at a later stage. It suggests that the features are perceived pre-attentively, i.e. subconsciously, while objects are consciously perceived by means of a so-called ‘attentional spotlight’.
Filter theory
Book definition: “Broadbent’s early-selection theory of attention, which assumes that, when sensory information has to pass through a bottleneck, only some of the information is selected for further processing, on the basis of physical characteristics such as the pitch of the speaker’s voice. (p. 55)”
Goal-directed attention
Book definition: “Allocation of processing resources in response to one’s goals. Contrast with stimulus-driven attention. (p. 54)”
Top-down processed attention directed by conscious selection. This type of attention is what we might call “focus” (i.e. singling out a single source of input to attend to, like reading this text). This is in contrast to stimulus-driven attention, which is directed by the influence of outside stimuli.
Illusory conjunction
Book definition: “The illusion that features of different objects actually came from a single object. (p. 63)”
Inhibition of return
Book definition: “The decreased ability to return our attention to a location or an object that we have already looked at. (p. 67)”
