Attention
"Any of the very large set of selective processes in the brain".
What is attention?
"Looking for target in a display full of other stimuli"
What is visual search?
"Failure to notice a change between two scenes"
What is Change Blindness?
Disorder described as a patient ignoring the contralateral visual field because it does not exist to them
What is Neglect?
Two areas of the brain are sensitive to faces and places respectively
What are the fusiform face area and the parahippocampal place area?
(regions of the brain which respond strongly to faces and places)
The kind of attention supports the fact that we are only able to process one thing at a time
What is selective attention?
The average increase in reaction time (RT) for each item added to a scene
What is efficiency?
(measured in more ms/item; the larger the slope, the less efficient the search)
"A failure to notice (or report) a detail in a scene that would be easily identified if paid attention to"
What is inattentional blindness?
Aspect of neglect suggests that neglect is an attentional disorder and not an issue with visual processing
What is extinction?
(patients' performances are worse when their attention is competed for – aka when there are two stimulus present – one in the contralateral field and one in the ipsilateral field)
When a stimulus is presented in one of several locations and once spotted, a participant is supposed to press a button
And the measurement of this timing called?
What is basic paradigm?
What is reaction time (RT)?
The 6 main kinds of attention
(Hint: They are like 3 sets of antonyms)
What is external, internal, overt, covert, divided and sustained?
Of the three kinds of searches, the one with a slope of 0
what does this suggest?
What is feature search? It suggests that we can process all the stimuli at once.
(feature search is defined by trying to identify a target based on one attribute. More than one differing feature would be considered a conjunction search which are WAY less efficient)
Two things that show the average distribution of properties and over a set of objects in a scene and the description of the structure of a scene respectively
What are ensemble statistics and spatial layout?
Disorder is characterized by bilateral lesions in the parietal lobes
What is Balint syndrome?
(spatial localization abilities are greatly reduced – "tunnel vision)
The three ways that responses of a cell can be changed by attention
What is response enhancement, sharper tuning, and altered tuning?
RE – needing less evidence to determine stimulus
ST – making improving your d prime
AT – changing the evidence needed to determine stimulus
The difficulty in perceiving and responding to
the second of two target stimuli amid a RSVP stream of distracting stimuli
What is the attentional blink?
(The second target is typically missed when presented between 200-500 ms after the first stimulus)
(believed to occur because once your attention is deployed, it takes a second to reset)
"Attention is restricted to a subset of
possible items based on information about the item’s
basic features"
What is a guided search?
The two pathways to scene perception and how they differ
What are the selective and nonselective pathways? The selective pathway pays attention to a few objects within a scene and goes through a "bottleneck" of selective attention while the nonselective pathway is involved with understanding the gist of a scene by attending to the distribution of features. It does not go through the bottleneck pathway.
Disorder manifests from brain damage to the fusiform gyrus (FFA)?
What is Prosopagnosia (face blindness)?
(cannot identify faces but can understand features; evidence that the face is processed as a whole rather than just features)
When you have to search for an item out of a group by looking through each individual item.
What is a serial self-terminating search?
This group of people have proven that we can improve our attentional blink
Who are video gamers?
It is used to study the temporal dynamics of visual attention.
What is rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP)?
Experiment proved that we are kind of good at remembering scenes
What is the Brady et. al experiment?
(that showed participants 2500 objects and they were – for the most part 80-90% – able to distinguish between which of two objects they had seen)
Disorder is a result of damage to V1 (primary visual cortex.
And why is it surprising that they claim to be blind?
What is Blindsight?
Because they are able to discriminate aspects about the stimulus such as location and orientation correctly (90% vs 50% chance)
A limited set of basic features can be
processed in parallel preattentively (i.e., before
selective attention is deployed to a particular object)
What is feature integration theory (FIT)?
illusory conjunction: the wrong combination of two features in a visual scene (blue circle and green square might be processed as a green circle and a blue square)