Chapter 6: Attention and its Effects on Stimulus Processing

Question 1

attention

Answer 1

marshalling of cognitive processing resources on a particular aspect of the external or internal environment, or on internal processes such as thoughts or memories

Question 2

arousal

Answer 2

1. A global state of the brain (or the body) reflecting an overall level of responsiveness

Question 3

visual spatial attention

Answer 3

attention directed to a location in visual space

Question 4

covert attention

Answer 4

focusing of visual attention toward a location or item in the visual field without shifting the direction of gaze. Can apply to other sensory modalities or to attentional paradigms

Question 5

overt attention

Answer 5

focusing of attention (typically visual) by voluntarily shifting gaze

Question 6

early selection

Answer 6

model of attention postulating that attentional mechanisms can selectively filter out or attenuate irrelevant sensory input at an early processing stage, before the completion of sensory and perceptual analysis

Question 7

late selection

Answer 7

theory of attention postulating that all stimuli are processed through the completion of sensory and perceptual analysis before any selection or influence of attention occurs

Question 8

endogenous attention

Answer 8

form of attention in which processing resources are directed voluntarily to specific aspects of the environment; typically prompted by experimental instructions or, more normally, by an individual’s goals, expectations, and/or knowledge

Question 9

exogenous/reflexive attention

Answer 9

form of attention in which processing resources are directed to specific aspects of the environment in response to a sudden stimulus change, such as a loud noise or sudden movement, that attracts attention automatically

Question 10

inhibition of return

Answer 10

phenomenon in an exogenously cued spatial attention paradigm that is apparent as a slower behavioral response to a target stimulus presented at the (validly) cued location later than 300 milliseconds after the cue

Question 11

brainstem evoked response (BER)/ auditory brainstem response (ABR)

Answer 11

series of small electrical brain waves that are elicited during the first 10 milliseconds after onset of a brief auditory stimulus and that can be detected at the scalp. BERs reflect activity in the auditory brainstem nuclei as the sound stimulus information reaches them in sequence via the auditory afferent pathways

Question 12

attentional stream paradigm

Answer 12

paradigm used in attention research in which two or more segregated series of stimuli are presented in parallel and subjects selectively attend to one of the series to perform a task

Question 13

auditory N1

Answer 13

first major negative ERP wave elicited by an auditory stimulus, arising mainly from secondary auditory cortex and peaking at about 100 milliseconds after the stimulus; can be strongly modulated by auditory spatial attention

Question 14

P3/ P300

Answer 14

large positive ERP wave elicited by stimuli that are surprising, are of an infrequent event type, or are task-relevant targets, usually when occurring within a stream of other sensory events; typically peaks between 300 and 500 milliseconds after the stimulus

Question 15

P20-50 attention effect

Answer 15

enhanced positive-polarity ERP wave elicited by an attended auditory stimulus, occurring between 20 and 50 milliseconds after stimulus onset; this effect provided particularly strong support for early-selection models of attention

Question 16

mismatch negativity (MMN)

Answer 16

negative ERP wave peaking at about 150 to 200 milliseconds following a deviant stimulus in a stream of otherwise identical stimuli (usually sound stimuli)

Question 17

attentional blink

Answer 17

cognitive phenomenon, typically observed in a rapidly presented stream of stimuli, in which the ability to successfully report a second target stimulus occurring within 150 to 450 milliseconds of a successfully reported first target in the stream is decreased

Question 18

biased competition

Answer 18

theory of attention that proposes that stimulus inputs compete in a mutually inhibitory fashion for neural processing priority and that a key role of attention is to bias the processing towards those items that are attended

Question 19

reentrant process

Answer 19

following a stimulus or event, a process in which neural activity is fed back to the same brain region activated earlier in the processing sequence

Question 20

perceptual load

Answer 20

level of processing difficulty or complexity of a task being performed by an individual;
usually measured by the time it takes for perceptual analyses of the stimuli

Question 21

processing negativity

Answer 21

slow, long-lasting negative-polarity ERP wave that is elicited during auditory selective attention, the amplitude of which reflects how well each stimulus matches an attentional “template

Question 22

selection negativity

Answer 22

slow, sustained, negative-polarity ERP wave, typically starting about 150 milliseconds after an attended visual stimulus, resulting from attention to a nonspatial visual feature of the stimulus

Question 23

feature similarity gain model

Answer 23

model in which the attentional modulation of the amplitude (gain) of a sensory neuron’s response depends on the similarity of the features of the currently relevant target and the feature preferences of that neuron

Question 24

visual search

Answer 24

searching in a visual scene with multiple stimulus items for a particular type of item possessing one or more specific feature attributes

Question 25

supramodal attention

Answer 25

focusing of attention on stimulus information across multiple modalities at the same time

Question 26

multisensory integration

Answer 26

combining of sensory information from different sensory modalities, facilitating the linking of that information together into one perceptual object