Week 8-9 Flashcards
What produced a change in the way we studied attention in the 1800s?
- Empiricism - conducting experiments
- Electricity
Who was the first person who studied attention orienting?
Hermann von Helmholtz
What are the ways we can shift attention?
- Overtly: others can see
- Covertly: others cannot see
Helmholtz was also interested in ____ and was an accomplished ____
- Afterimages
- Inventor
How does the T-scope work?
A person looks into a box with one eye and keeps their vision on a small pinhole of light (the fixation point) - their attention shifts to a card with letters placed around the pinhole before a spark coming from a Leyden jar lights up the box briefly before an afterimage can be seen
What did Helmholtz discover with the T-scope?
Afterimages are clearest where the person focused their attention
What are the two types of focal points?
Ocular & attentional
Michael Posner developed _____
A location cueing task to study covert orienting - tests whether a person could remember a target better if a cue was presented before it
How long does it take to target a saccade?
220 ms
What is a symbolic cue trial?
Symbol indicates where the cue will appear
What model of attention is associated with covert attention?
The spotlight model
Cross-modal attention tasks ____
Involve stimuli of more than 1 sensory modality
Lawrence Ward developed ____
A Posner task involving both visual and auditory stimuli
The results of Ward’s Posner task suggest ____
There is a common attention shift mechanism for all types of sensory input
What type of location cueing is more likely to produce good results?
Direct location cueing, as opposed to symbolic
Symbolic cueing is more associated with ____ than direct cueing
Cognitive processes & voluntary attention shifting
Stimulus-driven attention shifts are associated with ____ cueing
Direct
Goal-driven attention shifts are associated with ____ cueing
Symbolic
Concurrent tasks only affect _____ cues
Symbolic
Short cue-target delays affect ____ more, and longer delays affect ____ more
- Direct cues
- Symbolic cues
People use symbolic cues less when ______
Validity is low
____ is voluntary, while ____ is involuntary
- Symbolic cue use
- Direct cue use
What is the difference between analog and discrete attention shifts?
The spotlight stays on in analog, while it turns off during switching for discrete shifts
Attention shifts are mostly ____
Discrete
What brain regions are active during the different stages of attention orienting?
- Disengaging: parietal lobe
- Shifting: superior colliculus
- Engaging: pulvinar
What is the law of two levels?
The idea that we can change the size of our attentional focal point depending on the task we’re doing
What is the name of the phenomenon where performance is interfered with from a stimulus close to the cue?
Flanker interference
fMRI has shown that _____ is active during flanker interference
the anterior cingulate cortex
Why is Waldo so hard to find?
He does not have any unique features
What are distractors?
Non-target items
A target with a unique visual feature is called a ___
pop-out
Hard-to-find targets with a unique feature combination are found with a slower ____ of surrounding objects
serial inspection
What is the set0size effect?
The more distractors there are, the harder it is to find a target
There is no set-size effect if _____
the target has a unique feature
There is a set-size effect with _____
feature-conjunction targets
A search task in which you look for the target that is unique/changing in an image is called _____
the odd-item-out task
What was the first visual search model and who created it?
Feature integration - Anne Treisman
When searching, _____ is one-by-one and _____ is all at once
- serial
- parallel
Neisser proposed that _____ is involved when we’re looking for hard-to-find targets and _____ when a target pops out
- Serial
- Parallel
What is different about the way Treisman thought about feature integration?
The brain has different regions that carry out specific types of visual processing, and everything is integrated in a certain area
Feature maps are _______
Associated with specific features of an object
Location maps are ______
Associated with spatial information
Location maps only work with _____
Parallel processing
Illusory conjunctions occur when ______
There is not enough attention to “glue” features together
Illusory conjunctions indicate that some features can be _____
free-floating
What are emergent features?
A mis-combination of features
Where might the master map be?
Intraparietal sulcus (parietal lobe)
What is potential evidence for there being more than 1 attentional spotlight?
- split-brain patients
- multiple-object tracking
What is Pylyshyn’s explanation for why we are able to keep track of 4 objects in MOT?
We are not really tracking them, but putting markers on them
What type of feature (global or local) do we usually attend to first?
Global
The right parietal cortex mediates ____ processing
Global
The left parietal cortex mediates ____ processing
Local
