Lec 5 Attention Flashcards
What is Broadbent’s model of selective attention?
A model that states that sensory information is sorted through a gating mechanism for “important information” to go onto higher processing
What is the cocktail party effect?
A phenomenon observed by E.C. Cherry that allows auditory attention to focus on one stimulus whilst filtering out other stimuli.
What evidence disproved Broadbent’s gating model?
Treisman said unattended channel info is not completely blocked from higher analysis but was degraded instead.
Describe the early selection theory?
A stimulus need not be fully perceptually analysed for it to be determined as important or irrelevant
Describe the late selection theory?
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
Describe the Helmholtz visual attention experiment?
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)
What is covert attention?
Attending to a stimulus without directing sensory receptors towards the stimulus
What is overt attention?
Turning one’s sensory receptors to a stimulus
What is endogenous cuing?
Control of attention by internal stimuli under voluntary control (directing one’s attention to a lecturer or a book)
What is exogenous cuing/ reflexive cuing?
The control of attention by external stimuli that is not under internal voluntary control (flash of light or loud noise)
What are the areas of the brain that show attention related activities?
- Ventral prefrontal
- superior prefrontal
- superior colliculus
- pulvinar of thalamus
- posterior-parietal
- temporal-parietal junction.
What is neglect syndrome?
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
What is extinction?
The failure to perceive or respond to a stimulus contralateral to a lesion when presented with a simultaneous stimulus ipsilateral to the lesion.
What is Balint’s syndrome?
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.
What is a pop out search?
Search for target object that is obviously different from distracter objects
What is a conjunction search?
Search for a target that has similar features to the distracter objects
An increase in amplitude in event related potential is caused by what?
An irrelevant probe occurring at the relevant target stimulus (as opposed to it appearing at the irrelevant target)
What do P1 and N1 refer to?
P1 = the first positive amplitude wave N1 = the first negative amplitude wave
What is voluntary attention?
Ability to intentionally attend to something
What is reflexive attention?
Stimulus driven process in which a sensory event captures our attention
What is the dichotic listening task?
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
Who the fuck is William James?
This dude stated that bottlenecks seem to occur at stages of perceptual analysis that have a limited capacity.
