Introduction to selective attention

What do Lay definitions describe

a psychological commodity which is applied to enhance the sensations or awareness of external events

What did Titchener (1908) suggest in the Lay Concept

suggested that attention operated by increasing the clarity of perceptual events

What are cognitive theories based upon

the information-processing perspective in which the brain represents sensory input at various levels of description

What was Cherry (1953) experiment about

• asked people to shadow one of two messages presented to the left and right ear

• participants could accurately shadow spoken message in their right ear but had limited awareness of the message at the unattended ear

• Cherry concluded that unattended message was processed at early perceptual but not later phonological or semantic level of representation

What is human information processing characterised by

a limited central processing resources

Early attentional filter (bottleneck) protected limited resource by…

perceptual input on the basic of low-level properties (e.g. location and pitch)

There is evidence that unattended information was sometimes processed at what level

at a semantic level

What did Triesman (1964) find in the Locus of Selection

that response to target words in unattended channel were reduced rather than abolished

What is the Locus of Selection

it is flexible and determined by the perceptual properties of the stimulus, their relevance to individual or task and the cognitive load imposed by the task

What is exogenous attention

it is reflexive, fast acting, and produces biphasic modulaton of target processing at the cued location

What is endogenous attention

it is slower acting, requires effort and does not lead to inhibition of return

• focuses resources on goal-relevant stimuli, locations, or events

Why is inhibition important

when perceptual information interferes with the observers’ goals

What does reflexive attention focuses resources on

salient stimuli to facilitate fast responses to potentially threatening information

What is a salient stimuli

it refers to the features of objects in the environment that attract our attention

What is a visual search

it is our capacity to differentiate, prioritise, and act upon different objects in the visual scene

What does the visual search require

coordination of sensory and cognitive processes

What is bottom-up processing

it is when the brain process sensory information and uses clues to understand stimuli

What are the visual attributes that are defined as basic features

• orientation

• colour

• curvature

• motion

• depth

What is top-down processing

it involves perceiving things based on your prior experiences and knowledge

What happens to top-down representation when the perceptual attributes of the target are not unique

it is used to ‘guide’ visual search

How is exogenous attention captured in selective visual attention

by perceptual contrast

On what does endogenous attention focus resources on

• goal-relevant stimuli

• locations

• events

Who argued for Intergrated Competition Model of Attention

Duncan et al. (1997)

What did the Integrated Model of Attention (Duncan at al, 1997) argue

that what we pay attention to can be influenced by certain features, such as emotional valence

What is emotional valence

the extent to which an emotion is positive or negative

Hemispatial (visual) neglect is a neuropsychological syndrome associated with…

unilateral (predominantly right) cortical lesions

What would neglect be trandionally described and dinsangosed on the basis of

visuospatial deficits

What can neglect also be associated with

the contralateral side of objects independently of their location in the visual field

What is attention

it is the set of cognitive mechanisms that allow us to prioritise salient input for further analysis or action