Week 4: Chapter 22 - Attention and Consciousness Flashcards
What evolutionary problem do attention and consciousness address?
They help organisms select which sensory inputs to act on and determine appropriate behaviours.
What is attention?
A mental spotlight that selectively focuses on sensory input, thoughts, or actions.
Can attention be unconscious?
Yes, attention can be automatic (unconscious) or deliberate (conscious).
What is the role of language in attention?
Language may enhance the capacity for conscious attention.
What are the two levels of consciousness?
Primary consciousness (basic awareness) and secondary consciousness (self-awareness and planning).
What is primary consciousness?
Basic awareness of sensory experience.
What is secondary consciousness?
Awareness of one’s own awareness, including reflection and planning.
How do blindsight and numb touch demonstrate dissociation?
They show responses to stimuli without conscious awareness, indicating separate sensory processing and awareness.
What does the case of H.M. reveal about consciousness and memory?
He could learn tasks without remembering doing them, showing implicit memory without conscious recall.
What is hemispatial neglect?
A condition often after right parietotemporal damage where patients ignore the left side of space.
What do Koch and Tsuchiya argue about attention and consciousness?
They are distinct neural processes—attention is selective and top-down; consciousness is holistic and integrative.
What is the functional distinction between attention and consciousness?
Attention narrows focus for action, while consciousness broadens awareness for understanding.
What distinguishes automatic from conscious processing?
Automatic is fast, involuntary, and bottom-up; conscious is intentional, effortful, and top-down.
What did Treisman’s visual search experiments show?
Feature search is automatic; conjunction search requires focused, serial attention.
What is the role of attention in feature binding?
Attention integrates separate feature maps into unified object representations.
Why do sad or fearful faces capture attention faster?
Due to amygdala sensitivity to biologically significant, negative stimuli.
How did Moran and Desimone demonstrate attention affects neural activity?
They showed neurons in V4 respond more strongly when attention is directed to the stimulus.
What does divided attention research reveal?
Attention is a limited resource and performance suffers when multitasking.
How does task difficulty affect neuronal firing in V4?
Harder tasks increase firing rate and selectivity, enhancing discrimination.
What is the pulvinar’s role in attention?
Modulates attention by prioritising behaviourally relevant stimuli and guiding spotlight shifts.
What happens during cross-modal attention?
The DLPFC activates to coordinate divided attention across different sensory modalities.
How do real-world tasks like driving demonstrate attention limits?
Multitasking overloads the PFC, impairing attention to competing tasks.
What are the three attention networks identified by Petersen and Posner?
Alerting, orienting, and executive control networks.
What modulates the alerting network?
The noradrenergic system from the locus coeruleus.
What brain areas make up the orienting network?
Frontal eye fields, intraparietal sulcus (dorsal); TPJ and ventral frontal cortex (ventral).
What neuromodulator influences the orienting network?
The cholinergic system.
What are the two executive attention networks?
Frontoparietal (for shifting) and cingulo-opercular (for sustained control).
How does stress affect executive attentional networks?
It reduces activity in DLPFC, ACC, and parietal cortex, impairing performance.
What is neuronal synchrony and its role in attention?
Temporal coordination of firing that enhances signal strength and perceptual integration.
What frequency is associated with attentional synchrony?
Around 40 Hz (gamma frequency).
How does attention affect the default mode network?
It decreases activity in the default network while increasing synchrony in the attention network.
What does the binding problem refer to?
How the brain integrates features into a unified percept—possibly solved by neuronal synchrony.
What are the three main phenomena illustrating absence of visual attention?
Inattentional blindness, change blindness, and attentional blink.
What is inattentional blindness?
Failure to notice unexpected events when focused on another task (e.g., missing a gorilla in a video).
What is change blindness?
Failure to detect obvious changes in a scene when not expecting them.
What is attentional blink?
Missing a second target when it appears shortly after the first due to processing limits.
What do fMRI studies reveal about unattended stimuli?
They are processed in sensory areas but filtered out by higher-order attentional systems.
Where does conscious perception occur?
It is shaped by top-down modulation from attention networks, not within sensory areas.
What causes sensory neglect?
Damage to the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ), disrupting attention to the left side of space.
Why does right-hemisphere damage cause more neglect than left?
Right parietal cortex processes both visual fields; left only processes the right.
What is extinction in sensory neglect?
Perceiving left-sided stimuli in isolation but missing them when presented with right-sided stimuli.
How does prism adaptation help with neglect?
Shifts visual attention to the neglected side and improves awareness even after removal.
What role do the frontal lobes play in neglect?
They modulate attention in peripersonal space and adjust spatial awareness with tool use.
What does tool use in neglect patients reveal?
Tools extend the brain’s representation of body-related space, shifting neglect outward.
