Lecture 5

Question 1

What is TMI?

Answer 1

Too much information

Question 2

What is selective processing?

Answer 2

reducing the load of visual processing by filtering information

Question 3

What is retinal filtering?

Answer 3

a type of selective processing - colour information only encoded in the central visual field

Question 4

What is cortical filtering?

Answer 4

fine details are only represented in central vision

Question 5

What are the two types of eye movements?

Answer 5

1. saccades

2. fixations

Question 6

What are saccades?

Answer 6

small, rapid eye movements

Question 7

What are fixations?

Answer 7

pauses in eye movements that indicate where a person is looking

Question 8

What are two things that determine where we look at?

Answer 8

saliency - areas of stimuli that attract attention

Question 9

What are two reasons eye-movements can be voluntary?

Answer 9

1. scene schema - prior knowledge about what is found in a certain place e.g. microwave
2. task demands override stimulus saliency e.g. what am i doing next

Question 10

What are the three types of shifting attention?

Answer 10

1. Exogenous attention
2. Endogenous attention
3. Dynamic attention

Question 11

What is exogenous attention?

Answer 11

bottom-up processing, rapid shift geared towards survival

Question 12

What is endogenous attention?

Answer 12

top-down processing, slow shifts that are goal directed

Question 13

What is dynamic attention?

Answer 13

top-down processing, smooth shifts of attention over time

Question 14

Can attention be directed to without eye movement?

Answer 14

yes

Question 15

What is divided attention?

Answer 15

paying attention to more than one thing at a time

Question 16

What is attentional resolution?

Answer 16

you can see the dots in the outer ring but you can’t count them

Question 17

What are four things attention does?

Answer 17

1. attended objects are processed more efficiently e.g. Posner
2. better acuity and recognition performance
3. attention binds the world together
4. attention helps us find things

Question 18

What is the binding problem?

Answer 18

features of objects are processed separately in different areas of the brain

Question 19

How does binding occur? What is the theory?

Answer 19

Feature Integration Theory - attention binds features together

Question 20

What can failures of attention lead to?

Answer 20

illusory conjunctions - I might think that green apple is a red apple because the pre-attentative features are ‘free-floating’

Question 21

Who tested illusory conjunctions?

Answer 21

Triesman & Scmidt

Question 22

What did the test on illusory conjunctions find?

Answer 22

Coloured shapes & numbers: incorrect associations of features occurred 18% of the time, asking Ss to focus on targets eliminated this

Question 23

What is Balint’s syndrome?

Answer 23

can only attend to one thing at a time - parietal lobe damage

Question 24

What is spatial visual attention?

Answer 24

how do we allocate attention or find things in a complex arrays or scenes?

Question 25

What is the visual search paradigm? What does it compose?

Answer 25

subjects search for a target among distractors - set size (e.g. how many people on the beach) - subjects judge whether subject is absent or present - judge reaction time

Question 26

What were two findings of Treisman's experiment on conjunction searches?

Answer 26

conjunction searches - when you search for a object amongst a set that has properties that are similar e.g. size, colour, shape found that RT increased with set size for conjunction targets argued that conjunction searches are serial and self-terminating

Question 27

What are three basic features that 'pop-out' in displays?

Answer 27

1. colour 2. orientation 3. size

Question 28

What can we attend to?

Answer 28

1. spatial items - spotlight metaphor 2. a particular feature - e.g. blue 3. objects - attention can select an entire object

Question 29

What did the evidence for object-based attention that Egly et al. find? 2 points

Answer 29

1. fastest reaction time at targeted position | 2. "enhancement effect" for non-target within the target rectangle

Question 30

What was Colby's experiment about attention and the brain about? (monkey)

Answer 30

Monkey trained to keep eyes fixated on a dot whilst peripheral light was flashed on the right

Question 31

What did Colby's experiment about attention and the brain find? (monkey)

Answer 31

Neuron responded well when monkey was attending to peripheral light, neuron responded poorly when monkey was not attending to it

Question 32

What is the hypothesis that is linked to attention and binding in the brain?

Answer 32

Synchrony hypothesis - neurons firing to same object synchronise with each other e.g. orchestra metaphor

Question 33

Can perception occur without attention, why?

Answer 33

scenes can be processed in the absence of attention - observers could see an animal in the picture 76% of the time

Question 34

What did the study on autism and attention find?

Answer 34

autistic people look at socially irrelevant stimuli - thus when autistic people are in a social situation they may perceive the world differently