Chapter 4: External Attention Flashcards
Attention
Refers to a family of cognitive mechanisms that combine to help us select, modulate, and sustain focus on information that might be most relevant for behavior
Our ability to process information is ________, meaning we can handle only ______ amounts of information at a time
- Capacity-limited
- Small
Stimuli compete for our processing resources; Attention allows us to select and prioritize some information over other information. (T or F)
True
External Attention
How we attend outwardly, or select and modulate (adjust the influence of) sensory information.
In many respects, internal attention and external attention are _____ related and can influence each other
closely
Eye tracking
A tool researchers sometimes use in studying attention; cameras record where participants are looking
Because the light-sensitive part of our eyes (the retina) has relatively low acuity except at its center (the fovea), we need ______
To move our eyes around to piece together a high-resolution understanding of what lies before us
Studies have found links between _______ (eye movements) and attention
Saccades
Many neural regions associated with eye movements - such as ______, _____, _____, _____, ________ - overlap with those involved in shifts of attention
Superior colliculus, pulvinar, intraparietal, and post central sulci, and frontal eye field
Who was the first to demonstrate the role of saccades in attention?
Alfred Yarbus
Overt attention
Outwardly observable signs of where people are paying attention to
Attention is a function of the _____, not just the eyes
Mind
Covert Attention
You are able to direct attention in a way that could not be discerned by someone watching you
When you selectively attend to auditory or olfactory information, you often do so ______
Covertly
What are attention’s 3 overarching functions?
- Selection
- Modulation
- Vigilance
Selection
Singling out certain pieces of information among many
Voluntary attention
The effort to select goal-relevant information
Reflexive attention
Attending to a particular stimulus because it has seized your attention, instead of you actively choosing to attend to it
The tension between voluntary and reflexive attention can also occur in other sensory modalities besides vision. What is an example of another one?
Auditory, or hearing
Spatial attention
The ability to attend to regions in space
Does attention simply enhance information at a particular location, or does attention suppress information that is not at that location?
Evidence suggests both
Stimuli _______ to your target are particularly likely to be a source of interference, so it can be helpful to reduce processing of such stimuli
Adjacent
Poster cueing task
Reveals the movement of attention in space
Endogenous (central) cue
Engages voluntary attention and can appear in between the potential target locations and indicate symbolically where the target is likely to appear
Exogenous (or peripheral) cue
Engages reflexive attention and can appear at one of the target locations instead of in between them
Both endogenous and exogenous cues can be either _____ or _____
Valid or invalid
What does an exogenous and endogenous cue being valid or invalid mean?
They either correctly or incorrectly indicate the target location. Valid cues lead to faster responses, and invalid cues lead to slower responses
Reflexive attentional shifts tend to be _____, which means:
- Transient
- The benefits of reflexively processing stimuli at a location peak after about 150ms
The short period after reflexive attentional shifts when processing at this location is actually suppressed; this phenomenon is known as an:
Inhibition of return
Feature-based attention
The ability to attend to or filter out information based on features like color, shape, or motion
Feature-based tuning of attention often occurs even when we’re preparing….
To search for a target that hasn’t appeared yet
Feature-based attention appears to increase activity in neural regions sensitive to the _____ ______ across the visual field, even in the ______ of sensory stimulation
- Target feature
- Absence
Visual neurons responsive to that feature exhibit ________ sensitivity
Heightened
Temporal attention
Refers to our ability to pay attention to points in time
Attentional blink
Is an effect in which the second of two targets in rapid succession of items is more difficult to detect than the first
Object-based attention
Selective attention to an object rather than to a point in space
Spatial neglect
People fail to process stimuli that fall within their left visual field
Biased competition model of attention
One of the most influential and empirically supported models of attention; stimuli in a cluttered visual environment compete with each other to drive the responses of neurons in the visual system
Receptive field
A given neuron’s preferred region of the visual field
The _____ the distance among the stimuli, the _____ the overlap in the neuron populations that are activated, leading to ______ competition among the neural representations
- Smaller
- Greater
- Increased
Selective attention _____ the competition in favor of one stimulus over the others
Biases
Bottom-up selection
Driven by the salience of the physical features
Top-down selection
In favor of items that are goal-relevant
Ambiguity resolution theory of visual selection attention
The presence of multiple stimuli can lead to ambiguity about which mental representations accurately reflect the external world when neural clusters are activated. Attention, in this case, is though to help resolve this ambiguity.
Late selection
We may process the meaning of everything around us before we select what will gain entry to heightened awareness
Early Selection
Suggests we attentional select stimuli on the basis of physical features such as color, pitch, or location, and that we register their meaning only after we have selected them
Preattentive processing
the extent we process information before attentional selecting
Parallel processing
Occurs during pre attentive processing, and stimuli are analyzed at the same time
Serial processing
As items get attentional selected, analysis of them proceeds via serial processing - that is, more slowly, one bit at a time
Visual search task
Participants look for a target embedded in an array of non targets
Pop out
when a target’s detection is quick regardless of the search array’s size
Connection of features
People can’t find the target on the basis of just color or just shape - search times increases as the search array gets larger
Feature Integration Theory
Focusing attention on an object binds these features together, allowing us. to perceive a meaningful object
Binding problem
How do we make sense of the nearly infinite number of ways that features can be combined?
How does the feature integration theory solve the binding problem?
Such features are correctly bound to each other only as needed, through the allocation of attention
Illusory conductions
The incorrect combining of the features in front of us
Dichotic listening
Participants listen to two different messages playing simultaneously over headphones
Shadowing
When researchers ask participants to repeat the message out loud as it played
Cocktail party problem
People’s ability attend to one person’s voice at a loud party
Filter model of attention
Information is attended or ignored based on “early” stimulus characteristics (e.g. pitch or loudness), before the semantic meaning of the information is processed
What did Anne Treisman suggest?
Attentional selection initially occurs based on early, physical properties but does not eliminate processing of unattended information. Rather, the strength of the unattended signal gets dampened, even as the attended information is fully processed.
Attenuator Model of Attention
Meaningful information needs to meet a lower threshold of processing in order to reach awareness
Load theory of attention
Much depends on how demanding the attended task is. If the attended task is very demanding (high load), then attentional resources will largely be occupied, with few spare attentional resources for processing unattended information. In this case, “unattended” information will be filtered out at an early stage of processing and will neither reach awareness nor interfere with the attended task
Perceptual load
If load is high because the perceptual demands are difficult, and processing of non target information is diminished
Working memory load
If load is high because a task taxes working memory, and processing of nontarget information appears to increase
Modulation
Attention can change the way we perceive a stimulus
A state of heightened attentional anticipation, or _______, can enable us to better respond to stimuli before they appear
Vigilance
Attention ______ our perceptual sensitivity, providing benefits to how well, fast, and accurately we can perceive something.
Increase
What are three things attention has been found to enhance?
Spatial resolution with which we perceive objects, sensitivity to temporal and motion properties, and contrast
Continuous performance task
Many tests of attentional vigilance ask people to engage in this; participants are required to stay “on task” for a prolonged period of time
Inattentional blindness
A phenomenon in which people fail to notice an unexpected item right in front of their eyes when their attention is preoccupied
What does inattentional blindness reveals
Despite what the eyes register, the things that we become aware of depend on which aspects of visual information we select for further processing - in other words, what we attend to
Change blindness
Refers to the failure to notice large changes from one view to the next, and it reflects another, related failure of awareness in the absence of attention
How does change blindness differ from inattentional blindness?
Whereas inattentional blindness refers to a failure to notice a stimulus at all, evidence suggests that change blindness can sometimes occur not because people fail to notice a stimulus, but because people fail to compare two views of a stimulus in memory
Rapid serial visual presentation task
Participants try to find two targets in a very rapid sequence of items; they typically have difficulty reporting the second target if it appears too soon after the first target
Attention, it appears, needs a ______ ______ before a second item can be brought to conscious awareness
Resetting period
Explicit attention
Measures that probe people’s conscious awareness
Implicit attention
Measures that rely on non-conscious measures, such as response time or eye movement
Blindsight
A condition in which patients who have suffered damage to their visual cortex are sometimes able to respond to and localize visual stimuli that they report not being able to see
Attention may be necessary for awareness, but at least some aspects of attention are sufficient (T or F)
FALSE (“some aspects of attention are no sufficient”)
Our perception of the world at any given moment is a construction of the mind, which stitches together immediate sensory information with information from _______ _______ views. It also appears that we are able to rapidly process the _____, the overall idea, of a scene more quickly than we can process a scene’s details.
- Immediately preceding
- Gist
Attentional capture
An active area of attention research focused on understanding the kinds of stimuli that can draw our attention reflexively
An endogenous cue does not appear at the location of a subsequent target, but instead indicates symbolically where the target is likely to appear. The degree to which this type of attention shift is voluntary seems to depend on… ?
The nature of the cue
An exogenous cue is one that flashes on the screen at the location of the upcoming target, and this type of cues seems to grab attention even when the person does not want it (T or F)
True
Why should some stimuli grab attention more than others?
One suggestion is that very early in processing, the visual system computes the relative differences between visual signals across the visual field and forms a topographical representation known as a saliency map.
Contextual cueing
Refers to an effect that is observed when people search for a target in an array of non-targets over and over again, across many trials
Attentional bias
Refers to our tendency to direct attention to some types of stimuli over others, and when we show a preference to attend to emotional stimuli, this is known as an emotion-driven attentional bias
Attention bias modification
It may be possible to train people to overcome attentional biases and that training might help people disengage from threatening stimuli, thereby imparting a therapeutic effect.
Emotion-induced blindness
Even when people try to emotional stimuli, such stimuli affects our ability to consciously process other things
Value-modulated attentional capture
Provides compelling evidence that the allocation of attention based on learned value occurs relatively reflexively
Broaden-and-build theory
Positive emotions such as joy, contentment, interest, and love widen the range of information people readily consider and attend to, thereby facilitating individuals’ personal growth and connection to others
