Chapter 7

Question 1

Arousal vs Selective Attention

Answer 1

• Arousal attention
• • Wakefulness
• — Inattentiveness (drowsiness, relaxed states)
• — Attentiveness (alert states)
• • Sleep
• — Different sleep stages
• Selective attention
• • Attention to one thing while ignoring other things

Question 2

Properties of Selective Attention

Answer 2

• Prioritize some “things” for cognitive processing while deprioritizing or ignoring other things
• • Don’t have the bandwidth to process every single thing we see
• Voluntary (top-down) vs reflexive (bottom-up) attention
• • Voluntary: choosing to pay attention to something
• — Endogenous ”to come from within”
• • Reflexive: something draws our attention to it
• — Exogenous
• Overt vs covert attention
• • Overt
• — Shift in attention that is obvious from the outside
• — Someone turns their head away from you in the middle of a conversation
• • Covert
• — Shift in attention is not obvious from the outside
• — You keep your head turned to the person speaking but are paying attention auditorily to a conversation happening behind you

Question 3

The Spotlight Metaphor

Answer 3

• You can shift your attention around, you are aware of the things in the center of the attention, not as aware the farther you get away from center

Question 4

Benefits and Costs of Spatial Attention Spatial Cuing Paradigm

Answer 4

• If we are paying attention to a location and something happens there, we are faster to respond than we would be otherwise
• • (valid trials)
• • benefits
• If we are paying attention to a location and something happens outside of the location, we are slower to respond
• • (invalid trials)
• • Cost

Question 5

Selective Auditory Attention: The Cocktail Party Effect

Answer 5

In a room full of a lot of conversation, somehow we are able to selectively focus on one conversation and ignore the others

Question 6

Selective Auditory Attention: Intrusion

Answer 6

• When you really want to pay attention to one conversation, but something salient draws your attention away i.e. your name, a curse word
• Attention gets pulled away reflexively

Question 7

Dichotic Listening Task

Answer 7

• Ask the participant to attend to stimuli from one ear
• Tested through shadowing
• People could remember what they were listening to in the attended ear and not the ignored input (maybe could tell you something the gender of voice) unless intrusion occurs

Question 8

Early vs Late Selection Debate

Answer 8

• Early selection
  – In the early stages of analyzing the information
• Late selection
  – Attentional selection does not effect the process early on
  – All things are perceptually analyzed the same
  At the semantic level is where selection occurs
  (Where is the bottleneck
  Where does attention do selection
  When the question was first posed it was considered absolute
  A more nuanced version is what if it happens in more than one stage and does it have to be absolute in ear selection
  Problems were the belief that selection was all or none (intrusion disproves this))

Question 9

Descending Auditory Pathways May Modulate Very Early Auditory Processing

Answer 9

The act of paying attention effects how the sound is transduced in the ear

Question 10

Otoacoustic Emissions and Attention

Answer 10

When someone is paying attention to what they are listening to there is change on the otoacoustic emissions

Question 11

ERP in Dichotic Listening Task

Answer 11

• If the person is not paying attention to the sound you get a smaller n1 response
• If the person is paying attention to the sound you get a larger n1 response
• Suggests earlier selection?

Question 12

Magnetic Event-Related Fields Associated with Auditory Attention

Answer 12

• 20-50 ms
• Better spatial resolution than ERP
• We know attention is effecting 20-50 ms and where it is effecting it
• Primary auditory cortex
• Not possible that paying attention at the level of the retina because there are no descending pathways

Question 13

ERP’s in a Spatial Attention Task

Answer 13

• Valid trials
• • Positive P1 response
• • The p1 response is larger
• Invalid trials
• • The p1 response is smaller

Question 14

Spatial Attention Effects in the LGN and Cortex

Answer 14

• Ask to attend to the left visual cortex
• Greater activity in the right hemisphere thalamus and visual regions
• Retina vs cochlea
• The first place that attentional selection can affect processing is the thalamus
• This effects all of the processing downstream
• Earlier selection in the thalamus effects the activation in later pathways like the visual cortex
• Or is it possible that the visual cortex independent of the thalamus has its own attentional selection?

Question 15

Bestmann et al

Answer 15

• Testing if the visual cortex has its own mechanism for attentional selection
• B and D are virtual targets
• Tms is put on one of the hemispheres
  visual cortex is stimulated
• You see something in the contralateral vision field
• It starts in the visual cortex bypassing the usual flow of information

Question 16

Bestmann et al Conclusion

Answer 16

• The act of paying attention allows people to respond quicker
• When they aren’t attending people are slower to respond
• Does the same thing apply to virtual stimuli?
• The thalamus does not effect the virtual stimulus
• When it was a valid trial you did not have to turn the magnet up high
• When it was an invalid trial you had to turn the magnet up stronger
• It is important what you are paying attention to even if it bypasses the thalamus
• ATTENTION MODULATES VISUAL PROCESSING, EVEN IF THE STIMULUS BYPASSES THE THALAMUS
• Probably sites throughout the process

Question 17

Balint’s Syndrome

Answer 17

• Signs
• • Optic ataxia
• • Oculomotor apraxia
• — Difficulty controlling voluntary eye movements
• • Simultanagnosia
• — Difficulty seeing more than one part of a scene at once
• — Introducing more than one object causes the patient to only be able to see one of the objects, focus on one of the objects
• — Patient can perceive the comb but not the spoon
• — Attention gets lost on an object and has trouble disengaging
• — Suggests that something in healthy individuals allow us to quickly engage and disengage
• Bilateral brain damage causes it, typically parietal/occipital

Question 18

Neglect

Answer 18

• Leaves patients with a baffling syndrome, that makes it appear as if half their world has disappeared
• Copies only half of drawings
• Damage to the attentional system not the eyes

Question 19

Neglect Patients and Copying Tasks

Answer 19

• If you aren’t paying attention to stimulus its as if it doesn’t exist
• You aren’t even considering what you are missing
• Not attending to what you are missing
• Why is almost always left neglect?
• • Damage to the right hemisphere causes left neglect
• • Right neglect is pretty rare
• Deficit in ability to fully scan the object
• Theory; right hemisphere can compensate for damage to left easier

Question 20

Neglect Patient Recovering from a Stroke

Answer 20

• Unilateral special neglect
• Neglecting half of the canvas
• Neglecting half of his face
• Inflammation of the brain rather than cell death
• Plasticity
• Prism glasses that move everything to the right

Question 21

Neglect in Mental Imagery

Answer 21

• Patient who grew up in Mulan is asked to describe a famous piazza
• He leaves out the buildings that would have been on the left side of the piazza
• Then ask him to describes the piazza from the opposite side and he still neglects the left side of the piazza (i.e. he recounts the buildings that he could not the first time)
• We are using attention to explore imagery and to move around the spotlight

Question 22

Line Cancellation Task

Answer 22

• Patients are asked to cancel each line through the center of it
• Extrapersonal and object centered neglect

Question 23

Extrapersonal space neglect

Answer 23

• Where things are located relative to the person

- Left side neglect

Question 24

Object-centered neglect

Answer 24

• Right vs the left side of the object regardless of position relative to the viewer
• Neglects the left side of the objects

Question 25

Extinction in Neglect

Answer 25

- Whether or not someone is aware of something on the left side depends if there is competition on the right side - The fact that there is something on the right side distinguishes the ability to pay attention to the left side - The attention is trapped/stuck on the right side - - Can’t disengage object on the right to focus on left - Different than simultane agnosia because that agnosia is not concerned with left side and right side - - Cant disengage object - Suggests that the ability to disengage attention and move it somewhere else is very important

Question 26

Reflexive Cuing Task

Answer 26

- bottom-up reflexive attention -Task irrelevant visual stimulus - Cue has nothing to do with where the object appears - Exogenous vs endogenous cueing Inhibition of return occurs if delay between stimuli is greater than 300 ms - Once the brain evaluates whether or not there is something important in the location, it turns attention away - No matter how focused we are on something if there is something salient going on our attention is taken away - This goes away when there is nothing dangerous or important - Once we have reflexively been drawn to a location it is harder to draw our attention there again - If there is a long delay between cue and target in a valid trial it makes for a slower response

Question 27

Object Based Attention

Answer 27

- Simultane agnosia and object neglect - When its an invalid cue but shift of attention in the same object is faster than invalid cue with a different object (within objects vs between objects)

Question 28

Visual Search

Answer 28

- In the first one you only had to find a different single feature - - Equally fast no matter how big the set size is - - Pop-out search - - Not necessary to move your attention around from item to item to do a pop out search; the item reflexively draws your attention - - Occurs pre attentionally - - Attention is not necessary when searching for that one item - In the second one you aren’t looking for a single feature - - Find the conjunction of two features (I,e. red and o) - - The bigger the set the longer average of time it takes you to find - - Where’s waldo - - The ability to move our attention around is necessary to do a conjunction source

Question 29

Dorsal Attention Network

Answer 29

- IPs/SPL - FEF - - Saccod eye movements - - High stimulation by rods causes overt attention shifts - - Lower stimulation by rods causes covert attention shifts - Lights up specifically when the cue is presented (the moment the attentional shift occurs) - Goal-directed attention (voluntary shifts) - bilateral

Question 30

Ventral Attention Network

Answer 30

- The ability to disengage and move attention elsewhere after you’ve attended to something - Helps with invalid trials in special cueing paradigm - Simultane agnosia - Extinction in neglect - Highly lateralized to the right hemisphere - More patients have neglect in these areas than dorsal ones

Question 31

Subcortical

Answer 31

- Sources of attentional control - Superior colliculus; midbrain; eye reflexes - Pulvinar of the thalamus - - Poorly understood part of the thalamus - - Does not receive direct connections from the retina - - Visual stimuli like colors and shapes cause these cells to fire - - It focuses our attention on various things