Topic 5: Visual Attention Flashcards
Why do we pay attention to some things but not others?
Certain stimuli grab our attention (e.g. colour) = More salient
Less salient stimuli are ignored
Can’t pay attention to everything at once
The process which results in certain sensory information being selectively processed over other sensory information
Attention
Attention that involves moving your eyes from one place to another to directly look at the attended object/location
Overt attention
Shifting attention, without directly moving our eyes
Covert attention
Explain typical results of a dichotic listening task
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
The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli
Cocktail party effect
Briefly explain the filter model of memory
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
What procedure allows us to study how attention impacts our response time to specific locations?
Precueing procedure
Why is visual scanning necessary?
Good detailed vision only occurs for things you’re looking at directly
As we move form one fixation to the next, we show…
Saccadic eye movements (roughly 3x per second)
While overt attention dictates our fixations, covert attention…
Determines where we will look next.
Briefly explain why we don’t see blurry images as our eyes shift from place to place
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
Describes the idea that some things in the world draw our attention because they stand out against their background
Visual salience
Occurs when stimulus salience causes an involuntary shift of attention
Attentional capture
What are the factors that influence visual scanning?
Visual salience
Knowledge and experience
Goals or tasks
Schene schemas
Explain the roles of overt and covert attention
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.
When attention is directed to one part of an object, the enhancing effect of that attention spreads to other parts of the same object.
Same-object advantage
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.
Inattentional blindness
Issues with change detection that occur when change isn’t expected, happens slowly, or happens with complex stimuli
Change blindness
Why is it difficult to test specifically for attention?
underlies all other cognitive domains
Patients with damage to one hemisphere of the brain do not attend to the opposite side of their visual world.
Hemispatial neglect
Briefly explain the block tapping task
Patient can’t see the numbers
Need to pay attention in order to repeat the order of tapping
