chapter 7 Flashcards
arousal
global physiological and psychological state of the organism from deep sleep to hyper alertness (ie fear)
selective attention
the ability to prioritize and attend to some things and not others
bottom up processing
“what am I seeing”
- taking sensory info and then assembling/integrating it
top down processing
“is that something I have seen before?”
- using models, ideas, and expectations to interpret sensory info
- steered by goals and priorities
unilateral spatial neglect
where the brains attention network is damaged in one hemisphere
which hemisphere has more severe and persistent effects with unilateral spatial neglect
right hemisphere
line cancellation test
neuropsychological test to diagnose neglect
- patient is given a paper with horizontal lines, and the patient is supposed to draw lines to make it an even cross -> patients with unilateral neglect will either miss lines to the left and/or put their line more to the right
are problems of neglect associated with attention or sensation?
attention
What can neglect affect?
ability to accurately cross lines, copy a picture, imagination and memory,
extinction
failure to respond to a stimuli when presented with a stimulus unilateral to the lesion
Balints Syndrome
caused by bilateral damage to regions of the posterior parietal and occipital cortex
- severe disturbance of visual attention and awareness
- basically only one object is perceived even when it is with multiple
3 main deficits of Balints syndrome
-simultanagnosia
-ocular apraxia
-optic ataxia
simultanagnosia
inability to perceive more than one object at a time
ocular apraxia
absence or deficit of controlled eye movement
optic ataxia
inaccuracy of visually guided hand movements
difference between neglect and balints syndrome
-which brain area is damaged
- neglect is unilateral lesions of parietal, posterior temporal, and frontal cortex
- Balint’s is from bilateral occipitoparietal lesions
two types of attention
voluntary and reflexive
voluntary attention
endogenous
- top down thinking
- goal driven
- consciously choosing one thing over another
reflexive attention
exogenous
- bottom up thinking
- sensory related info
- can fade if sensory info is thought to be unimportant
overt attention
looking directly at something while paying attention
covert attention
looking at something else while paying attention to one tjng
Helmholtz experiment
-investigated covert attention
- proved you can pay attention covertly while keeping your eye on another stimulus
neglect is to ____ as Balints is to _____
unilateral; bilateral
cocktail party affect
by selectively attending, you can perceive the signal of interest amid the other noises
- when talking to someone at a party you can still comprehend another salient stimulus
- late selection
dichotic listening task
participants could not report any details of the speech in the unattended ear except if the speaker was male or female
- shows that voluntary attention affects what is processed
- early selection
bottleneck information processing
stages through which only limited amount of information can pass
broadbent
-said info processing has processinf bottlenecks
- early selection
early selection
a stimulus can be selected for further processing or be tossed out as irrelevant before perceptual anaylsis of the stimulus is complete
- wrong
late selection
perceptual system first processes all inputs equally, then selection takes place at higher stages of info processing that determine whether the stimuli gain access to awareness, are encoded in memory, or initiate a response
triesman
proposed info from an unattended channel was not completely blocked from higher analysis, but degraded or attenuated instead
- late selection
posner
spatial cuing paradigm
- measured the effect of attention on info processing to examine how participants respond to target stimuli under differing conditions of attention
endogenous cuing
the orienting of attention to a cue is voluntary
exogenous cuing
stimuli automatically captures attention because of its features
Costs and benefits of attention
when looking at a valid cue, the benefits of attention are a faster response
when looking at an invalid/neutral cue, the costs of attention are longer reaction times
inhibition of return
inability to return attention to a location to a task irrelevant cue because your brain recognizes its not salient
pop out search
only one target is a different color/letter, does not increase reaction time
conjunction search
multiple targets are different colors/letters, does increase reaction time
feature integration theory
miscombining features when your attention is focused on something else
