Week 2: Attention Flashcards
Attention
It is the mechanism that we use to select for further in-depth neural processing items that are of most interest to us.
Attention
Does not only select external sensory items of interest to receive further processing, but also internal thoughts and memories.
Train of Thought
Sequences of related thoughts or ideas.
Example: Thinking about your grocery list while planning your dinner menu
Attention Bias
A tendency to preferentially focus on certain types of stimuli.
Humans have a natural bias towards faces, especially emotional ones. This bias can be exaggerated in individuals with mental health conditions like anxiety and depression.
Negative Attentional Bias
The tendency to preferentially focus on negative information or stimuli while overlooking or downplaying positive or neutral information.
Cognitive bias that directs attention toward threats, errors, or negative outcomes.
What Grabs Our Attention?
1) Salient Stimuli (loud, bright, sudden) - helps us identify potential danger/threats
2) Novelty (new or unexpected) - we’re always curious and seeking new info
3) Motion (moving or changing objects)
Motion Transients
Visual changes that automatically draw our focus.
Exogenous Attention (bottom-up/automatic)
The automatic allocation of your attention based on the
properties of the stimuli themselves.
Endogenous Attention (top-down/intentional)
Not automatic, but instead is the allocation of
attention to items that you’ve chosen to pay attention to.
Preattentive Processing
The subconscious and automatic processing of information from the environment without conscious effort or attention.
Preattentive Processing
It’s the initial stage of perception where our brains rapidly take in sensory data and extract basic features like color, shape, orientation, and motion.
Pop Out Search (Feature Search)
The target differs from distractors by one fundamental dimension (i.e., colour, shape, size).
A search based on a single distinctive feature of the target
Conjunction Search (Serial Search)
The target shares features with distractors, requiring a more detailed search.
Set Size
The number of distractors in a visual search.
Parallel Search
A search process where multiple items can be processed simultaneously.
What happens to items we don’t pay attention to?
They are filtered out
Inattentional Blindness (Mack & Rock)
When we don’t pay attention, can be effectively blind even to salient visual stimuli.
Inattentional Blindness
The failure to notice a clearly visible object because attention is focused elsewhere.
Sustained Attention
Paying attention to the same item for a sustained period of time.
Tactile
Sense of touch
Right Parietal Cortex
Has a crucial role in sustaining attention across time.
Involved in spatial processing, alertness, distraction inhibition, and sensory integration.
Visual Spatial Neglect
The syndrome that results from right parietal damage.
Patients suffering from such neglect one whole side of the world and they act as if it no longer exists.
Attention and Awareness
If you lose the ability to pay attention you lose the ability to be aware of those things too.
Contralesional
Opposite side of the brain lesion
Ipsilesional
Same side of the brain lesion
Bisection Task
Patients are presented with horizontal lines and asked to bisect the line - that is mark the middle of the line.
Cancellation Task
Patients are asked to cancel out all of one type of stimuli.
Representational Neglect
The inability to attend to mental images on the neglected side of space, despite intact memory for those details.
Implicit Processing
Refers to the unconscious or unintentional influence of information on thought and behavior.
It occurs without conscious awareness or deliberate effort.
Implicit Detection of Thread
When emotionally threatening stimuli are presented on the neglected side there is some residual processing.
Extinction
A milder form of neglect where patients can detect stimuli on the neglected side when presented alone but fail to detect them when presented simultaneously with stimuli on the attended side.
Threatening Stimuli
Can bypass conscious awareness and be implicitly processed in neglect patients.
Emotional Salience
A measure of how much an event or piece of information captures our attention and evokes an emotional response.
Attention
A cognitive process that allows us to selectively focus on specific information while filtering out irrelevant stimuli.
Selection
The process of focusing on specific information from the environment or internal thoughts and memories.
It involves choosing what to attend to and what to ignore.
Awareness
The state of being conscious or having knowledge of something.
It encompasses a wide range of mental states, from being fully alert and attentive to a vague sense of something.
Conscious Awareness
A state of being fully alert and aware of one’s surroundings and internal thoughts.
It involves active processing and understanding of information.
Residual Processing
The continued processing of information, often below the level of conscious awareness.
It refers to the idea that some information may be processed even when we are not consciously attending to it.
