Cognition: Attention Flashcards
Differentiate between internal and external attention
External attention refers to selecting and controlling incoming sensory information while internal attention readers to selecting control strategies and maintaining internally generated information such as task rules, responses, long term memory and working memory.
What is the attention system?
A framework of the human brain containing three different systems for alerting, orienting and the executive function.
Where does the alerting system take place?
Brain area in the brain stem and frontal cortex that are responsible for achieving a state of arousal.
Where does the orienting system operate
Brain areas in the frontal and parietal cortex that direct our processing resources to incoming information and includes areas such as the frontal eye fields (involved with the generation and control of eye movements) that are involved with rapid strategic control of attention.
Where does the executive system operate?
Anterior cingulate cortex, regions along the medial frontal cortex and in the parietal cortex and regions of the frontal cortex.
Which systems are internal and which are external?
Internal- executive
External- orienting
Give an example of attention at a conceptual level being applied to an engineering design.
The Articulated head in the Powerhouse museum in Sydney with an attention operating system.
What is meant by load theory?
The amount of processing an unattended stimulus will receive depends on how difficult it is the process the attended target.
What is the filter theory?
A filter is used to block irrelevant information so that the only important message would reach a central channel for further processing.
What is meant by early and late selection?
Early selection describes when the filter for attention occurs early in the stream of information processing while late selection describes when it occurs late in the stream of information processing. Thus the filter eliminates some information that has already been processed.
What is the main principle of load theory?
If the principle target is easy to process then it will overflow to irrelevant factors and these will be identified, indicative of late selection.
What is the meant by the zoom lens model?
We can focus a lot of attention on one small thing then less attention when we ‘zoom out’ at the larger scene.
Describe an experiment which contradicts certain aspects of the filter and zoom lens model
Egly et al had you focus on a cross between two rectangles. First one end of a rectangle would light up. You then had to press a button when you seen another end of a rectangle light up. Participants reacted faster when the other end of the same rectangle lit up rather than when the other rectangle lit up despite being the same distance. This shows attention focuses on objects and not just their spatial location.
What is meant by the dual-task paradigm?
This arises when one measures performance on two tasks individually then measuring performance when doing them simultaneously. If performance in a task is equal in both then they do not compete for mental resources.
What does dual-task paradigm suggest about our attention?
It suggests we don’t draw from a single central attention resource and supports the idea of a multiple resource model.
