Lec 5 Attention

Question 1

What is Broadbent’s model of selective attention?

Answer 1

A model that states that sensory information is sorted through a gating mechanism for “important information” to go onto higher processing

Question 2

What is the cocktail party effect?

Answer 2

A phenomenon observed by E.C. Cherry that allows auditory attention to focus on one stimulus whilst filtering out other stimuli.

Question 3

What evidence disproved Broadbent’s gating model?

Answer 3

Treisman said unattended channel info is not completely blocked from higher analysis but was degraded instead.

Question 4

Describe the early selection theory?

Answer 4

A stimulus need not be fully perceptually analysed for it to be determined as important or irrelevant

Question 5

Describe the late selection theory?

Answer 5

Attended and ignored inputs (conversation and background crowd) are equally perceptually analysed and then analysed for meaning and encoded where selection of irrelevance and importance may occur

Question 6

Describe the Helmholtz visual attention experiment?

Answer 6

Eyes fixated on the centre of a screen full of letters, flash of illumination on a select few of letters, could covertly attend to said letters and perceive them, could not perceive other letters on screen (not illuminated)

Question 7

What is covert attention?

Answer 7

Attending to a stimulus without directing sensory receptors towards the stimulus

Question 8

What is overt attention?

Answer 8

Turning one’s sensory receptors to a stimulus

Question 9

What is endogenous cuing?

Answer 9

Control of attention by internal stimuli under voluntary control (directing one’s attention to a lecturer or a book)

Question 10

What is exogenous cuing/ reflexive cuing?

Answer 10

The control of attention by external stimuli that is not under internal voluntary control (flash of light or loud noise)

Question 11

What are the areas of the brain that show attention related activities?

Answer 11

• Ventral prefrontal
• superior prefrontal
• superior colliculus
• pulvinar of thalamus
• posterior-parietal
• temporal-parietal junction.

Question 12

What is neglect syndrome?

Answer 12

The brain’s attention network is damaged in only one hemisphere. Patients have reduced arousal and processing speed, and an attention bias in the direction of their lesion. Contralateral

Question 13

What is extinction?

Answer 13

The failure to perceive or respond to a stimulus contralateral to a lesion when presented with a simultaneous stimulus ipsilateral to the lesion.

Question 14

What is Balint’s syndrome?

Answer 14

Difficulty in perceiving objects after bilateral occipito-parietal stroke. Can only perceive one object at a time. Can identify objects, but cannot relate them to one another.

Question 15

What is a pop out search?

Answer 15

Search for target object that is obviously different from distracter objects

Question 16

What is a conjunction search?

Answer 16

Search for a target that has similar features to the distracter objects

Question 17

An increase in amplitude in event related potential is caused by what?

Answer 17

An irrelevant probe occurring at the relevant target stimulus (as opposed to it appearing at the irrelevant target)

Question 18

What do P1 and N1 refer to?

Answer 18

P1 = the first positive amplitude wave
N1 = the first negative amplitude wave

Question 19

What is voluntary attention?

Answer 19

Ability to intentionally attend to something

Question 20

What is reflexive attention?

Answer 20

Stimulus driven process in which a sensory event captures our attention

Question 21

What is the dichotic listening task?

Answer 21

Different auditory info presented to each ear, participant asked to attend to one side and recall the other info, however, mostly cannot recall any info from unattended ear

Question 22

Who the fuck is William James?

Answer 22

This dude stated that bottlenecks seem to occur at stages of perceptual analysis that have a limited capacity.