L3 - Attention Flashcards
1
Q
What are the three networks of attention?
A
- Orienting: primitive - develops early in life
- Alerting: primitive
- Executive: matures later throughout life - in frontal region
- All different brain processes
2
Q
What is orienting?
A
- Drawing attention to a region
- Early emerging and most primitive
- Fully operational in infancy and little change
- Involves cortical brain regions and subcortical regions
3
Q
What are early improvements in attention?
A
- Saccadic movements (subcortical movements) emerge before smooth pursuit (jumping eye movements to smooth)
- Stickly/obligatory attention = hard to disengage once they are looking at it - at 1 month
- Increase in smooth pursuit and ability to anticipate movements instead of lagging behind them between 2-6 months
4
Q
What are orienting tasks? (Exp)
A
- Train infants when they saw one stimulus, the subsequent stimulus appeared on the left side of the screen
- When they saw another stimuli, the next stimulus appears on the right
- Show them repeatedly and test their anticipation and prediction
- Show them first stimulus and then show them blank document and see which direction of the screen they look for
5
Q
How to measure attention disengagement?
A
- Spatial cueing
- Stimulus and second stimulus shown but sticky attention requires time to transfer their attention to the second
RESULTS:
- Tested 2,3,4 mo old
- 4 mo. Showed systematic anticipatory looks to the correct location and to successfully disengage on trials
- They found a change in contingency learning and disengagement across mo 2-4
6
Q
What is Alerting?
A
- Arousing attentional system through a cue
- Cue = something is about to occur and has some info about target
- Present in infancy but refines in early primary years
- More prominent in left hemisphere, frontal and parietal areas and in thalamus
- Associated with norepinephrine
- Cues can be auditory or peripheral vision
7
Q
What was an alerting task? (Exp)
A
- Infants look at blank screen and animal will randomly appear
- Testing reaction time
- If there is a sound = faster reaction time (acts as an alerting cue)
8
Q
What is executive attention?
A
- Collection of cognitive activities involved in goal-directed tasks and problem solving
- Includes inhibitory control, error correcting/shifting, working memory
- Relatively late emerging: develops through adolescence
- Frontal areas of brain involved
- Associated with dopamine
9
Q
What are attentional control tasks?
A
- Flanker task: respond to central stimulus e.g is arrow matching the stimulus
- Stroop test: respond to colour of text, not what the text says
- Stroop test can be adapted for children by giving pictures and to state the opposite to the picture
- Wisconsin Card sorting test - sort cards by categories, and they need to switch between rules when told and inhibit previous rule
10
Q
What is an example of inhibitory control?
A
- Wisconsin Task
- Marshmallow task: children are given marshmallow and told eat it now OR WAIT FOR 10 MINUTES and you get 2 marshmallows - tests ability to delay gratification
11
Q
What is the attention network test across development?
A
- Combine all three attentional systems in one task (alerting, orienting and executive)
- Fixation cross, spatial cue, another fixation cross, flanker task (which direction Is middle arrow facing)
- Response times and rate of errors differ by what type of trial they are seeing e.g congruent (faster) and incongruent trials (better attentional control = congruence difference should not vary as much)
- For orienting tests, they combine spatial cues relative to central cues
- For alerting system, time period between fixation cross and flanker task varies
12
Q
How do responses change over time?
A
- Similar patterns in adult and child version of ANT
- No change in alerting reaction time from 6-10 years
- Reduced reaction time for orienting in older ages but not significant
- Improvement in conflict from 6-7 and then its stable
13
Q
Evidence of independence of networks?
A
- Lack of correlation between reaction times suggest independence of systems
- Could be due to noise and lack of reliability
- Overall negative relation between reaction time and accuracy is consistent with past literature and known trade-off
14
Q
What is joint attention?
A
- Attention that is joint/shared when a person coordinated attention between an object/event and other person
- Called triadic attention
- Important for things like word learning
15
Q
What is intersubjectivity?
A
- Mutual understanding that people share during communication
- Operationalised as turn-taking like peek-a-boo
16
Q
What is social referencing?
A
- Look to social partners for guidance about how to respond to unfamiliar or threatening events
- Get affective info from parents e.g if parents have a scared face, children will be scared
- Explains why children cry when they fall and parents overreact
17
Q
What is following attention?
A
- Looking where someone else looks
- Infants start at 3 months and increases through 18 months
- head turns, gaze, points and choosing between multiple targets
18
Q
What were the relations between joint attention and executive function? (Study)
A
- Attuned caregiving in infancy (15 months)
- Joint attention in toddlerhood (24 months)
- Executive functions in early childhood (48 months)
- Looked at longitudinally
19
Q
How did they measure attuned caregiving in this study? (CATS AF)
A
- Free-play in semi-structured interactions: same set of toys and play however
- Contingent vocalisations: responding to each other vocally even not with words
- Appropriate attention focusing
- Timing paced to child’s interest and arousal
- Shared positive affect: smiling etc
- Appropriate level of stimulation: quite vague
- Done at 15 months of age
20
Q
How did they measure joint attention at 24 months?
A
- Mum and baby shared attention on the same page of a book during shared book reading of a picture book
- Are parent and child looking at the same point of the book at the same time
- Did not differentiate between initiated and responded
21
Q
How did they measure executive function at 4 years of age? (WASPS)
A
- Working memory span
- Pick the picture game
- Silly sounds Stroop task
- Animal go/no go
- Something is not the same game
22
Q
What were the aims of their study?
A
- Does attuned caregiver relates to subsequent joint attention and executive functioning (yes - performance was better when caregivers were more attuned)
- If individual differences in 24 mo were related to individual diff in executive functioning at 48 mo (yes = more joint attention performed better one executive functioning tasks)
- Does this vary based on income to needs ratio (yes, kids who are living in poverty = higher joint attention at 24 mo would be more likely to have higher progress at 48mo. And vice versa, high income = graph is a lot less steeper, does not show such a strong correlation)
- Does joint attention mediate relations between caregiving and executive functioning (yes)
