Topic 5: Visual Attention

Question 1

Why do we pay attention to some things but not others?

Answer 1

Certain stimuli grab our attention (e.g. colour) = More salient

Less salient stimuli are ignored

Can’t pay attention to everything at once

Question 2

The process which results in certain sensory information being selectively processed over other sensory information

Answer 2

Attention

Question 3

Attention that involves moving your eyes from one place to another to directly look at the attended object/location

Answer 3

Overt attention

Question 4

Shifting attention, without directly moving our eyes

Answer 4

Covert attention

Question 5

Explain typical results of a dichotic listening task

Answer 5

Easily shadow the attended ear
Can report whether the unattended ear is male/female
Can’t report the unattended message, even when it’s a word that is repeated multiple times in a row

Question 6

The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli

Answer 6

Cocktail party effect

Question 7

Briefly explain the filter model of memory

Answer 7

Messages get sent to sensory memory, which passes to a filter

Attended messages will pass through the filter and get sent to the detector

From the detector, messages pass to memory

Question 8

What procedure allows us to study how attention impacts our response time to specific locations?

Answer 8

Precueing procedure

Question 9

Why is visual scanning necessary?

Answer 9

Good detailed vision only occurs for things you’re looking at directly

Question 10

As we move form one fixation to the next, we show…

Answer 10

Saccadic eye movements (roughly 3x per second)

Question 11

While overt attention dictates our fixations, covert attention…

Answer 11

Determines where we will look next.

Question 12

Briefly explain why we don’t see blurry images as our eyes shift from place to place

Answer 12

We have a corollary discharge system that compares the motor signals going to your eye muscles vs. the image that moves across your retina and decides whether movement should be perceived

Question 13

Describes the idea that some things in the world draw our attention because they stand out against their background

Answer 13

Visual salience

Question 14

Occurs when stimulus salience causes an involuntary shift of attention

Answer 14

Attentional capture

Question 15

What are the factors that influence visual scanning?

Answer 15

Visual salience
Knowledge and experience
Goals or tasks
Schene schemas

Question 16

Explain the roles of overt and covert attention

Answer 16

Role of overt attention: Can intentionally shift our attention by moving our eyes to enable us to see things of interest more clearly, places things of interest “front-and-center”

Role of covert attention:
Can affect how quickly we can respond to locations and to objects.

Question 17

When attention is directed to one part of an object, the enhancing effect of that attention spreads to other parts of the same object.

Answer 17

Same-object advantage

Question 18

It is possible to be extremely attentive but still miss things, even if they are clearly visible to us; usually, its simply because we aren’t directing our attention directly to them.

Answer 18

Inattentional blindness

Question 19

Issues with change detection that occur when change isn’t expected, happens slowly, or happens with complex stimuli

Answer 19

Change blindness

Question 20

Why is it difficult to test specifically for attention?

Answer 20

underlies all other cognitive domains

Question 21

Patients with damage to one hemisphere of the brain do not attend to the opposite side of their visual world.

Answer 21

Hemispatial neglect

Question 22

Briefly explain the block tapping task

Answer 22

Patient can’t see the numbers
Need to pay attention in order to repeat the order of tapping