lecture 3

Question 1

define attention

Answer 1

is the process by which the mind chooses from among the various stimuli that strike the sense at any moment.

Question 2

define divided attention

Answer 2

we can focus on one conversation and block another one. e.g. the cocktail party phenomenon.

Question 3

what is the early selection model?

Answer 3

early in the processing stream that attention acts.

Question 4

late selection model

Answer 4

attention happens at the later stages e.g. attention sets in when we identify.

Question 5

we can attend to a stimulus if it has high…

Answer 5

valience

Question 6

how are cats an example of early selection model of attention?

Answer 6

• measure brain stem of cats whilst sounds were played, 3 different conditions. they played a sound and it was found that the neuron inflection was smaller than usual when the cat was staring at the mouse

Question 7

what other explanation could exaplin why their was a smaller inflection in the mouse condition?

Answer 7

the inflection could be that was smaller because the ears were pointing down in the mouse condition

Question 8

what is dichotic listening?

Answer 8

hearing two different messages in each ear.

Question 9

electrophysiological measures

results of the ERP for dichotic listening?

Answer 9

record signal for both ignored and attended message. There was a higher input for the ignored- suggest evidence for early selection

Question 10

MEG is used to reconstruct…

Answer 10

to pin point the location, so we can say that attention occurs for early selection as the brain area is lighten up.

Question 11

exogneous attention

Answer 11

transient, bottom-up, or automatic e.g. environmental triggers such as a loud bang.

Question 12

endogenous attention

Answer 12

sustaine, top down or voluntary- what we choose to pay attention to.

Question 13

valid and invalid cue trials

Answer 13

• we react raster when we see what we expect to see
• posner matching task

Question 14

ERP evidence

what results from ERP support the endogenous task

Answer 14

when you attend to the left where we expect the target to be there is a larger inflection in the neuron signals

Question 15

what is the inhibition fo return

Answer 15

time gap between cues is too long, reaction times increase when dots appear before the box but this doesnt happen if box happen if the box appeas more than 250 milliseconds after the box- interstimuli interval

Question 17

spatial attention

Answer 17

attention to a specific location in space irrespective of what else is present

Question 18

feature based attention

Answer 18

attention to specific stimulus features irrespective of their environment

Question 19

object based attention

Answer 19

attention to specific parts of the object

Question 20

neurons fire more when the stimulus…

Answer 20

receptive field is attended to- this firing leads to the EEG and ERP effect.

Question 21

what is a retinotopic visual area on a flattened brain means…

Answer 21

use clever stimuli to mao out areas, a mirror image of the outside world is represented int he brain.

Question 22

what is retinotopy

Answer 22

the orderly representation of the retinal image of the brain.

Question 23

what is the biased competition model of attention

Answer 23

if both stimuli are presented simultaenously there is an immediate response

Question 24

you can win the competition of attention by…

Answer 24

being the stimulus the animal attends to.

Question 25

recpetive fields tend to…

Answer 25

shrink when we attend to a specific stimuli

Question 26

dorsal pathway

Answer 26

motion

Question 27

ventral pathway

Answer 27

colour and objects.

Question 28

evidence for dorsal and ventral pathways

Answer 28

the dots move and change colour, so they found that when asked to attend to motion MT is active and when you tend to colour v4 is active.

Question 29

object attention

i

Answer 29

is an automatic spreading of information across the object.