Task 4- Consciousness Flashcards
What is inattentional blindness?
people can miss obvious changes because they paid attention to something else
i) failure to notice a visual object or event, which ii) was in fact fully visible (in field of view) and iii) easily identified under circumstances in which it is consciously perceived
What are common change blindness tasks?
o viewers look at images on a computer monitor
o briefly leaving the screen blank, distracting participants, or interjecting visual noise (‘mudsplats’), suddenly makes this change very difficult to perceive
o change blindness can also occur in almost the opposite situation: With very slow changes in a stimulus without distractions
What are common attentional blink tasks?
o series of letters is presented rapidly one after the other on a computer monitor (this is called RSVP; rapid serial visual presentation) and participants need to report letters appearing in red
–> Since a red letter stands out, it grabs attention easily
What is the common result of attentional blink tasks?
o if a pair of targets are presented shortly after another, the second one is often missed
o first letter grabs your attention; attentional system “out of order” shortly after that (like a blink)
For which period of time does the attentional blink tasks work?
o Works not for between 200-400 ms after pictures; works for under 200 ms and more than 400 again
What is the cocktail party effect?
o Our attention systems allow us to voluntarily focus on what the person opposite us is saying. We can filter out all the competing, distracting, surrounding conversations
–> top-down/ endogenous
o ability to voluntary focus of what we choose to perceive and process
What is the lunch line effect?
o pronunciation of your name in another conversation manages to pull your attention away from whatever you currently paid attention to
–> bottom up attention/ exogenous
What is attention?
…is the prioritised processing of some inputs from a larger set of selectable items
Which types of attention include spatial/ space-based attention?
- Top-down attention
- Bottom-up attention
- Divided attention
- Covert attention
- Overt attention
What is top-down attention?
- Endogenous attention (goal-directed)
- E.g. cocktail party effect
- Voluntary focus of attention
- You control it; you actively select the inputs to prioritize
Which brain areas are probably involved in top-down attention?
Hierarchically higher-up brain regions such as frontal and parietal cortex are probably involved
How does the endogenous Posner Task work?
you fixate a cross, symbolic cue appears (arrows pointing to whichever side symbol is going to appear)
- -> if it appears on the side as predicted (valid cue): shorter reaction time
- 500 ms break
- only 25% of time: invalid cue
What is bottom up attention?
Exogenous attention (or automatic attention) (stimulus directed)
- e.g. lunch line effect
- Our attention can shift by the salience of stimuli on our environment
How does the exogenous Posner Task work?
- only 100 ms break
- NO arrows
- another cue that draws your attention that is not as attention- drawing (e.g. dots)
- 50% of time: invalid cue
What is divided attention?
We can focus un multiple things at the same time –> multitasking
What cost does divided attention come at?
You perform less well on both tasks
What does the difficulty of divided attention depend on?
depends on:
1) how constantly your attention is required for both tasks (one idea about divided attention or dual attention tasks is that participants actually rapidly switch attention between the two)
2) the relation and similarities between both tasks (more difficult when tasks are similar)
What is covert attention?
- allocation of attention without making eye movements
- attention could be shifted (on purpose or automatically) to the left or right, but the participants’ gaze never left the fixation cross
What is overt attention?
shift in attention is accompanied by a shift in gaze
Which types of attention does feature attention/ feature-based attention?
- Object attention
- Temporal attention
What is feature attention generally?
o Attention paid to features
o visual features: color, orientation, or intensity (brightness)
What is object attention?
- attention to one object rather than another
- e.g. task: house and face superimposed
What is temporal attention?
- Attention in time
- You expect something to happen in time (e.g. if a beat is missing)
Describe the experiment used to investigate temporal attention? (visual target with cues)
- experiment -> symbolic cue: indicates whether after that a visual target will appear early or late
- valid cues: reaction times shorter than when invalid cues presented -> stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) (=after which time the stimulus appeared)
What is selective attention?
ability to prioritize and attend to some things while ignoring others
What is the filter theory of attention?
Sensory store -> selective filter (only attended stimuli pass through) -> Bottleneck: higher level processing Working memory
==> filter early and hard
What was the critique on the initial filter theory of attention?
Lunch- line effect not explainable
How was the filter theory of attention revised?
o Attenuation filter rather than selective filter: filtered stimuli weakened, but not blocked altogether; salient things can pass through bottleneck (can still explain lunch-line effect)
o filter: later processing stage than previously thought, so after the level of semantic (word meaning) processing
