The attending brain Flashcards
The process by which certain information is selected for further processing and other information is discarded
Attention
A failure to be aware of a visual stimulus because attention is directed away from it
Inattentional blindness
A failure to notice the appearance/disappearance of objects between two alternating images
Change blindness
Any aspect of a stimulus that, for whatever reason, stands out from the rest
Salient
The movement of attention from one location to another
Orienting
The movement of attention from one location to another without moving the eyes/body
Covert orienting
The movement of attention
accompanied by move-
ment of the eyes or body
Overt orienting
A slowing of reaction
time associated with
going back to a previously
attended location
Inhibition of return
Attention that is externally
guided by a stimulus
Exogenous orienting
Attention is guided by the
goals of the perceiver
Endogenous orienting
A task of detecting the
presence or absence of a
specified target object in an
array of other distracting
objects
Visual search
An inability to report a target stimulus if it appears soon after another target stimulus
Attentional blink
Contains neurons that respond to salient stimuli in the environment and are used to plan eye movements
Lateral intraparietal area (LIP)
A fast, ballistic movement of the eyes
Saccade
A spatial layout that emphasizes the most behaviorally relevant stimuli in the environment
Salience map
Adjusting one set of spatial coordinates to be aligned with a different coordinate system
Remapping
Part of the frontal lobes responsible for voluntary movement of the eyes
Frontal eye field (FEF)
A failure to attend to stimuli on the opposite side of space to a brain lesion
Hemispatial neglect
In a non-lesioned brain there is over-attention to the left side of space
Pseudo-neglect
The ‘raw’ feeling of a sensation, the content of awareness
Phenomenal consciousness
The ability to report on the content of awareness
Access consciousness
The ability to detect an object among distractor objects in situations in which the number of distractors presented is unimportant
Pop-out
A situation in which visual features of two different objects are incorrectly perceived as being associated with a single object
Illusory conjunctions
A theory of attention in which information is selected according to perceptual attributes
Early selection
A theory of attention in which all incoming information is processed up to the level of meaning (semantics) before being selected for further processing
Late selection
If an ignored object suddenly becomes the attended object, then participants are slower at processing it
Negative priming
In the context of attention, unawareness of a stimulus in the presence of competing stimuli
Extinction
A severe difficulty in spatial processing normally following bilateral lesions of the parietal lobe; symptoms include simultagnosia, optic ataxia and optic apraxia
Balint’s syndrome
Inability to perceive more than one object at a time
Simultagnosia
A task involving judging the central point of a line
Line bisection
A variant of the visual search paradigm in which the patient must search for targets in an array, normally striking them through as they are found
Cancellation task
A map of space coded relatively to the position of the body
Egocentric space
A map of space coding the locations of objects and places relative to each other
Allocentric space
