Chapter 4 Vocab Terms

Question 1

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

Answer 1

Attention

Question 2

We can only handle small amounts of information at a time

Answer 2

Capacity-limited

Question 3

How we attend outwardly,
or select and modulate (adjust the influence of) sensory
information.
Sights, sounds, smells, or touch, rather than internal thoughts or memories (internal attention)

Answer 3

External attention

Question 4

Rapid, jerky eye movements that quickly shift the focus of vision from one point to another.
Crucial for efficient vision, and abnormalities in this movement can be linked to neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease or schizophrenia.

Answer 4

Saccades

Question 5

Measures outwardly observable signs of where people are paying attention

Answer 5

Eye tracking

Question 6

The act of directly focusing on a specific object or location by moving your eyes, head, or body toward it. It involves visible, physical actions that indicate what you are paying attention to.
Ex:
Looking at a speaker during a conversation, turning your head to watch a passing car

Answer 6

Overt attention

Question 7

Where you focus on something without moving your eyes. You’re able to direct attention in a way that could not be discerned by someone watching you.

Answer 7

Covert attention

Question 8

The effort to select goal-relevent information

Answer 8

Voluntary attention

Question 9

Attending to a particular stimulus because it has seized your attention, instead of you actively choosing to attend to it

Answer 9

Reflexive attention

Question 10

The ability to attend to regions in space.
Enhances info at a specific location and supresses info that is not at that location.

Where’s Waldo

Answer 10

Spatial Attention

Question 11

Engages voluntary attention and indicate symbollicallt wher the target is likely to appear.
Requires internal processing, voluntary attention, top-down processing

Answer 11

Endogenous cue

Question 12

Engages reflexive attention and can appear at one of the target locations.
Involuntary, sudden changes from environment, bottom-up processing

Answer 12

Exogenous cue

Question 13

The ability to attend to or filter out information based on features like color, shape, or motion.

Answer 13

Feature-based attention

Question 14

Selective attention to an object rather than to a point in space.
Attention to one part of the object entails attention to the whole object.

Answer 14

Object-based attention

Question 15

Stimuli in a cluttered visual element compete with each other to drive the responses of neurons in the visual system.
Attention is integrated into the processing of information, influencing which stimuli are processed more deeply and which are suppressed.

Answer 15

Biased competiton model

Question 16

A given neuron’s preferred region of the visual field is known as that neuron’s ____.
Stimuli withing the same ____ compete with each other.

RF

Answer 16

Receptive field

Question 17

We process the meaning of everything before we select for heightened awareness

Answer 17

Late selection

Question 18

We attentionally select stimuli based on physical features such as color, pitch, or location and register their meaning after selection.

Answer 18

Early selection

Question 19

Extent to which we process info before attentionally selecting it.

Answer 19

Preattentive processing

Question 20

Focusing attention on an object binds features together.
Although we can process features prior to attentional selection, we need attention to combine them accurately.

Anne Treisman

Answer 20

Feature integration theory

Question 21

Attentional selection depends on how demanding the attended task is.
“High load task”, “Low load” task

Answer 21

Load theory