Visual Attention Flashcards

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1
Q

What is attention?

A

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

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2
Q

What is overt attention?

A

When you move your eyes from one place to another to focus on a particular object or location

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3
Q

What is covert attention?

A

When you shift your attention without moving your eyes

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4
Q

What was Cherry’s listening experiment?

A

Used dichotic listening to present stimuli in the left and right ears
Participants had to focus on one ear and repeat what was being said out loud

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5
Q

What were the results of Cherry’s listening experiment?

A

Participants could shadow a message in the attended ear but couldn’t report on the other ear

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6
Q

What is dichotic listening?

A

Presenting different stimuli in the left and right ears

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7
Q

What is shadowing?

A

Repeating words as they are heard

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8
Q

What is the cocktail party effect?

A

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

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9
Q

What is Broadbend’s model of attention?

A

Messages enter a filtering unit that will then let the attended message be detected

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10
Q

What was Michael Posner’s precueing experiment?

A

Does paying covert attention to a location improve a person’s ability to respond to stimuli presented there?
Used precueing

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11
Q

What is spatial attention?

A

Attention to a specific location

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12
Q

What is the precueing method?

A

Participants look at a + in the display
An arrow appears to show which side the stimulus is likely to present on
Press a key as fas as possible when target square was shown

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13
Q

What were the results of Posner’s precueing experiment?

A

Participants reacted faster in a detection task on valid trials than on invalid trials
Information processing is more effective at the place where attention is directed

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14
Q

What is Anne Teisman’s feature integration theory?

A

There is a preattentive stage, then a focused attention stage, and then perception

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15
Q

What was Teisman’s experiment?

A

Participants asked to report identity of black numbers first and then what they saw in each location of the shape
Numbers were correct but not shapes, generally

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16
Q

What is illusory conjunction?

A

When features of objects combine

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17
Q

What is the preattentive stage?

A

Features of an object are analyzed rapidly and un-consiously
Features exist independently of each other

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18
Q

What is the focused attention stage?

A

Attention becomes involved and conscious perception occurs

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19
Q

What is binding?

A

Individual features are combined

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20
Q

What is visual search?

A

A procedure where we look for an object among a number of other objects

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21
Q

What is a feature search?

A

Look for a target with a single feature

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22
Q

What is a conjunction search?

A

Search for a combination of two or more features
Takes longer than a feature search

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23
Q

What is fixation?

A

When you are scanning a scene and pause briefly

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24
Q

What is saccadic eye movement?

A

Rapid, jerky movement from one fixation to the next

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25
Q

What is corollary discharge theory?

A

Why we don’t see a blur when our eyes move
Associated with 3 signals

26
Q

What are the 3 signals in corollary discharge theory?

A

Motor signal
Corollary discharge signal
Image displacement theory

27
Q

What is the motor signal?

A

Occurs when a signal to move the eye is sent from the brain to the eye muscles

28
Q

What is the corollary discharge signal?

A

A copy of the motor signal, so occurs whenever there is a motor signal

29
Q

What is the image displacement signal?

A

Occurs when an image moves across the retina, as happens when movement of the eye causes the image of stationary scene to sweep across the retina

30
Q

What is the comparator in the corollary discharge theory?

A

When only a CDS or IDS signal reaches the comparator movement is perceived
When both a CDS and IDS signal reaches the comparator then no movement is perceived

31
Q

What does corollary discharge help us with?

A

Keeping our world stationary as our eyes move and deals with the snapshot problem by helping the brain prepare for what is coming next

32
Q

What is predictive remapping of attention?

A

Attention begins shifting toward the target just before the eye begins moving toward it
The reason we see a stable, coherent scene

33
Q

What is visual salience?

A

Scene regions that are markedly different from their surroundings, whether is colour, contrast, movement, or orientation

34
Q

What is attentional capture?

A

Situations in which properties of a stimulus grab attention against one’s will

35
Q

What is a saliency map?

A

Reveals regions which are visually different from the rest of the scene

36
Q

What are scene schemas?

A

An observer’s knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes
People will spend more time looking at things that are out of place

37
Q

What is the same-object advantage?

A

The faster responding that occurs when enhancement spreads within an object

38
Q

What did Carrasco show?

A

That attention affected the perceived contrast between the alternating light and dark bars where perceived contrast refers to how different the light and dark bars appear

39
Q

What does attention to object increase?

A

Increases activity in specific areas of the brain

40
Q

What does attention to locations increase?

A

Increases activity in specific areas of the brain

41
Q

What does attention shift?

A

Receptive fields

42
Q

What is inattentional blindness?

A

A stimulus that is presented but not attended is not perceived

43
Q

What is change blindness?

A

An inability to detect changes in an object or a scene

44
Q

What is spatial neglect?

A

Lack of attention to objects in a certain visual field (for example, spatial neglect in the left side)

45
Q

What is extinction?

A

provides insight into attentional processing because it suggests that the unawareness of stimuli on the left is caused by competition from the stimuli on right (or vice versa)

46
Q

What is a selective attention task?

A

Requires responding to a stimulus while ignoring others

47
Q

What is a divided attention task?

A

Requires attending to two or more simultaneous stimuli

48
Q

What did Green and Bavelier find?

A

That action video game players consistently performed better on tests of attention and information processing

49
Q

What do patients with Balint’s syndrome experience more of?

A

Illusory conjunctions, deficit in locating targets in conjunction search

50
Q

What is unilateral neglect?

A

Deficit in awareness of items on one side of space due to brain damage
Cannot reproduce a full image

51
Q

What are some explanations for unilateral neglect?

A

Problem in disengaging attention from ipsilateral side; cueing helped reduce spatial bias
Disruption of balance between hemispheres in directing attention; more stimuli on ipsilateral side hampers attention to contralateral items

52
Q

What was Humphrey’s experiment?

A

Stimuli was 150 apples, some full, some with gaps on either side
Task was to cross out all of the complete apples in 5 minutes
Participants were people with neglect
Results = egocentric and allocentric neglect

53
Q

What is egocentric neglect?

A

Unaware of one side of space
Brain damage was clustered in right anterior cortical regions and subcortical structures
Overlooked complete apples on one side of the page

54
Q

What is allocentric neglect?

A

Unaware of one side of objects
Brain damage was in the right posterior cortical regions
People were crossing out apples with a gap on one of the sides

55
Q

What is brain damage to the right parietal regions common to?

A

Egocentric and allocentric neglect

56
Q

What were the implications of Humphrey’s study?

A

Attention may be either location or object based
Damage to location = egocentric
Damage to object = allocentric
Location = better for static scenes
Object = better for dynamic scenes

57
Q

What are the implications of inattentional blindness studies?

A

Not everything presented to our senses is processed
Attention is limited
Visual encoding must be selective or sparse

58
Q

What is the binding problem?

A

How are independent, parallel subsystems in vision fused together into a unitary percept?

59
Q

How does convergence address the binding problem?

A

Neurons coding for different aspects of an object converge on a single neuron detecting that particular combination
Grandmother cells
No evidence

60
Q

How does temporal synchrony address the binding problem?

A

Neurons that signal different aspects of the same object fire in synchrony
Synchronization does not occur if each assembly is triggered by a different stimulus
objects symbolized by population coding
Attention may help synchronize neural firing

61
Q

What is spatial configuration search?

A

Target defined by organization of features
eg. find the 5 among 2s