Tutorial1 Flashcards
What role does the brain stem’s Reticular Activating System (RAS) play in regards to attention, and what happens when there is damage here?
It’s the most basic attention function; poor extraction of information from environment, coma (unresponsiveness to most external stimuli), stupor, chronic vegetative state
Which brain regions are responsible for saccade (eye-movement) control and moving/directing attention from one object to another, and what do deficits here lead to?
Midbrain structures including superior colliculus; problems with turning attention from one point to another
Supranuclear palsy is the degeneration of which two brain areas, and what does this result in?
Basal ganglia and superior colliculus; patients behave as if blind and don’t instinctively turn towards stimuli unless commanded to (intact effortful processing)
Which brain region is responsible for early gating or filtering information, and what occurs when damaged?
Thalamus (especially pulvinar nucleus); inability to engage attention on one location and filter out irrelevant information from other locations
What is the parietal lobe responsible for, and what can damage here lead to?
Visual and spatial aspects of attention, including overall attentional resources to a particular stimulus or task, and when shifts in attention are necessary; hemispatial neglect (inattention to one side of space)
Which region modulates the ability to select an appropriate response based on incoming information?
Cingulate cortex (interfaces between cortical and subcortical regions)
Which brain regions are involved with inhibiting inappropriate responses?
Frontal lobes - initiating responses; motor and premotor cortices - making the movements; supplementary motor area - dealing with abstract concepts, selecting and extracting meaning and working on “online” information
What happens when there is damage to the frontal lobes?
Distractibility or interference; attentional resources are captured by irrelevant information and not focused on relevant information
What are some experimental paradigms we can use to test or manipulate different mechanisms of attention?
Endogenous (internal) or exogenous (environmental) shifts in attention; Response biases (response selection); Distractor interference (inhibition of appropriate info); Inhibition of return (time taken for attention to recover); Visual search (attention shifting); Priming (unconscious processing); Temporal order judgements (order of events)
Our brain relies on cues to allocate attentional resources, name four of these
Exogenous (from the environment); Endogenous (driven by goals); Overt (involves shifting of gaze); Covert (attention shift without shifting the eyes)
What’s the difference between a valid and invalid endogenous cue
Valid directs attention towards the target; invalid directs attention away from the target
According to the Posner Cueing Paradigm, if cues are to be exogenous, where do they need to be cueing?
At the location itself (not arrows)
List some behavioural response measures used in attentional tasks
Manual (e.g. clicking a mouse); Saccadic (eye-tracking); Verbal; Motion capture
What is the Pre-Trial Period (PTP)?
Time that elapses before onset of first stimuli in trial
What does Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) refer to?
Time lag between onset of cue and onset of target (influenced by conscious or unconscious perception)