visual attention

Question 1

Attention- definition and importance

Answer 1

attention is the ability to preferentially process some parts of the stimulus at the expense of processing other parts of the stimulus. importance= we cant focus on everything simultaneously so attention stops us from being overwhelmed.

Question 2

overt attention/ covert attention

Answer 2

OA= looking directly at an object
CA= looking at one object but attending to another object

Question 3

saccades and fixation

Answer 3

eyes don’t scan a visual, scene but rather jump from point to point. when the eye stays at one point during jumps, this is known as fixations.

Question 4

direction of attention

Answer 4

• an involuntary process= mediated by attentional capture and is involuntary (know and ‘attentional capture’
• then our attention is directed cognitive factors such as goals (voulantary).

Question 5

saliency

Answer 5

saliency determines what we attend to first, because it often stands out

Question 6

the binding problem

Answer 6

different aspects of a stimulus are presented independently, often in seperate brain areas. for example, motion is processed in one stream and form is processed in another area. the issue of how an object’s individual features are combined to create a coherent percept is known as the binding problem.,

Question 7

Feature integration theory

Answer 7

FIT= suggests that the binding problem is solved by attending to only one location at a time.

Question 8

Balient’s syndrome

Answer 8

RM= patient has parietal lobe damage, when multiple objects are present, RM has difficulty focusing attention on a single object. RM= prone to experiencing illusory conjunctions because he could not focus attention on just a single object.

Question 9

visual search - conjunction search

Answer 9

binding ccurs if the targer has the same features as the distractors, if the target differs only by a particular function, it is a conjunction search. FIT predicts that CS needs to be applied to each object in turn.

Question 10

Feature search

Answer 10

If the target contains a feature ( colour) which the target doesnt, the binding problem doesnt need to be solved. It is a fast search.

Question 11

binding problem.

Answer 11

(conjunction) visual searches that require the binding problem to be solved= predicted to be slow

(feature) visual searches that don’t require the binding problem to be solved= fast.

Question 12

change blindness

Answer 12

Attention can also determine what we remember, if you don’t attend, you probably wont remember. (spot the difference example)

Question 13

motion transients

Answer 13

why doesnt change blindness occur all the time? because changes usually generate motion transients that draw attention to the location of change, so it is easy to spot the change.