L1 Attention and Consciousness Flashcards
What is inattentional blindness?
Mack and Rock 1988
Events in the environment go unnoticed if it is not the focus of attention
What is change blindness?
Simons and Levin 1997
Drastic changes go unnoticed if not paying attention
50% of people did not notice the change in person they were talking to
What is exogenous attention?
Attention captured by external events in the environment
In an experiment - driven by cue that has a physical similarity with a task-relevant stimulus
What is the cocktail party phenomena ?
A case for selective attention
Enhance relevant information and filtering out irrelevant information
Similar to the lab experiment ‘dichotic listening task’
What is endogenous attention?
Attention allocated according to behavioural goals or predictions about events in the environment
In an experiment - the cue shares no similarity with the target
What is the dorsal and ventral system in relation to selective attention?
Dorsal - goal driven, predictions on what will happen in the environment and what is relevant to achieve goals
Ventral - stimulus driven, responding to events from the environment and important for breaking up current attentional allocation
What is hemispatial neglect?
Patients with lesions in their right parietal, frontal and temporal lobes experience a loss of sensory awareness of their left hemifield
This is not due to a visual deficit in their eyes
What is blindsight?
A phenomenon where despite having in tact eyes, a patient has lost vision or conscious awareness
This may affect part of their visual field or reflect a complete loss of conscious vision
What is the where and what pathway for blindsight?
Where - for spatial analysis of scenes (location and spatial relations between objects) also sensorimotor functions - grasping movements
What - for detailed object recognition, semantic analysis
What did Sperry’s find about the hemispheres through split brain research?
Patient with their corpus callosum cut which is responsible for transporting info between the hemispheres
Left - language, serial processing, motor planning
Right - geometric spatial imagery, emotional processing, holistic processing
What are direct and indirect measures of perception?
Direct - A task that assess whether a participant is able to consciously perceive stimulus, manipulate the stimulus until it is unperceivable
Indirect - A task with these parameters where the parameters where the participant is supposed to make a separate, different judgement on that stimulus
What are the effects of subliminal stimuli on motor execution and response preparation?
PS have to indicate the location of bars surrounding the target by L/R button press
Asked to judge the location of the bars on the prime (direct measure)
Reducing the timing in-between prime and target reduces visibility of the prime for 50%
What is the Libet experiment ?
A PS is asked to repeatedly flex their wrist at irregular intervals, entirely at free will
They are asked to remember the position of the clock when they move their wrist
EEG and movement recorded
How long does it take for the decision -> motor cortex -> movement
Considerable time before the decision
What is the global workspace hypothesis?
A weak stimulus may progress through the brain hierarchy but without eliciting awareness
A stimulus that is the spotlight of attention will cause large network activity and allows flexible mental operations
An unconsciously processed stimulus does not reach a representation that allows flexible manipulation or changes to the higher level representations
