Cognition chapter 4

Attention

A family of cognitive mechanisms that combine to help us select, modulate, and sustain focus on information that might be most relevant for behavior

Ex: The Oklahoma City drivers distracted by a window display

Capacity-limited

We can handle only small amounts of information at a time

Ex: Stimuli compete for processing, so attention acts as a gatekeeper

External attention

How we attend outwardly, or select and modulate sensory information

Ex: Attending to the road ahead

Internal attention

Attention directed inwardly toward thoughts, feelings, task rules, potential responses, and items in memory

Ex: Daydreaming in class interfering with the lecture; the working memory/CDA study

Eye tracking

Cameras record where participants are looking

Ex: Yarbus’s Nefertiti study showed fixations on the eyes, nose, and mouth

Saccades

Eye movements; programming a saccade cues attention to its target before the eyes move

Ex: About 150,000-250,000 per day

Overt attention

Attention measured by outwardly observable signs of where people are attending

Ex: Eye tracking; infants’ gaze at faces predicting autism diagnosis

Covert attention

Directing attention in a way that couldn’t be discerned by someone watching

Ex: Looking at your right hand while wiggling and attending to the left fingers

Multiple-object tracking

A technique for assessing sustained, often covert attention, tracking identical moving items

Ex: About four items; a quarterback or a parent in a crowd

Selection

Singling out certain pieces of information among many

Ex: Finding a storefront in Times Square

Voluntary attention

The effort to select goal-relevant information

Ex; Listening to your friend at a loud party

Reflexive attention

Attending to a stimulus because it has seized your attention, not because you chose to

Ex: Festive whoops grabbing your attention at the party

Spatial attention

The ability to attend to regions in space; likened to a spotlight (and a zoom lens)

Ex: Where’s Waldo? It enhances the target location and suppresses nearby information

Posner cueing task

A task revealing movement of attention in space: a cue precedes a target, and valid cues speed responses

Ex: An arrow points to the target location about half a second beforehand

Endogenous (central) cue

Engages voluntary attention; appears between potential locations and indicates symbolically where the target will appear

Ex: An arrow

Exogenous (peripheral) cue

Engages reflexive attention; appears at one of the potential target locations

Ex: A flash at the target location

Valid/ invalid cues

Cues that correctly or incorrectly indicate the target location

Ex: Valid → faster responses; invalid → slower

Inhibition of return

A short period of suppressed processing at a location after the transient benefit of reflexive attention (which peaks at about 150 ms)

Ex: Avoids rechecking the same spot when searching for a friend in a crowd; looking for your keys in your house

Feature-based attention

The ability to attend to or filter out information based on features like color, shape, or motion

Ex: Searching for red while ignoring other colors; feature-tuned neurons become more sensitive across the visual field

Temporal attention

The ability to pay attention to points in time

Ex: The attentional blink; alpha oscillations affecting awareness

Object-based attention

Selective attention to an object rather than a point in space

Ex: Egly et al.: invalid cues on the other rectangle slowed responses more than on the same rectangle

Spatial neglect

Failure to process stimuli in the left visual field (often after right-brain damage); sometimes the left side of each object

Ex: The clock drawing with numbers only on the right

Biased competition model

Stimuli in a cluttered environment compete to drive neuron responses; attention biases the competition toward one stimulus

Ex: Beck & Kastner: a neuron’s response drops when competitors share its receptive field, and attention restores it

Receptive field

A neuron’s preferred region of the visual field

Ex: Competition is fiercest among stimuli in the same receptive field

Bottom-up selection

Biasing competition by the salience of physical features

Ex: A brightly colored item standing out

Top-down selection

Biasing competition toward goal-relevant items

Ex: Hunting for a friend’s striped shirt

Ambiguity resolution theory

Neural clusters support several representations, so multiple stimuli create ambiguity; attention helps resolve it

Ex: A related variant of biased competition

Early selection

Selecting stimuli by physical features (color, pitch, location), registering meaning only afterward

Ex: Broadbent’s filter model

Late selection

We may process the meaning of everything before selecting what reaches heightened awareness

Ex: Hearing your own name in the unattended ear

Preattentive processing

Whatever processing happens before attentional selection

Ex: A jumble of unbound colors and shapes at a fruit stand

Parallel processing

Taking in stimuli quicky and all at once

Ex: A red target among green items “pops out” regardless of array size

Serial processing

Analysis one bit at a time, more slowly

Ex: Search time rises with array size for conjunction targets

Visual search task

Participants look for a target embedded in an array of nontargets

Ex: Finding the red target (feature search) vs. a red circle among red squares and blue circles.

Conjunction

A combination of features; the target can’t be found by color alone or shape alone

Ex: A red circle among red squares and blue circles

Feature integration theory

Treisman: preattentively we experience unbound simple features; attention binds them into objects

Binding problem

How we combine features (color, shape, motion) processed in different brain regions

Ex: Solved, per the theory, by allocating attention as needed

Illusory conjunctions

Incorrectly combining the features in front of us

Ex: A red A and blue X reported as a blue A and red X

Dichotic listening

Listening to two different messages simultaneously over headphones

Ex: Attend to the right ear and test memory of the left

Shadowing

Repeating the attended message out loud as it plays

Ex: Ensures participants truly attend (Fig. 4.11)

Cocktail party problem

The ability to attend to one message while ignoring another, like following one person’s speech at a loud party

Ex: Participants noticed pitch or gender changes and a 400-Hz tone, but not a language switch

Filter model of attention

Broadbent: selection by early stimulus characteristics before semantic meaning is processed

Ex: A nightclub bouncer deciding which stimuli get in

Attenuator model

Treisman: selection begins with physical properties, but the unattended signal is dampened, but eliminated; meaningful information needs a lower threshold

Ex: Hearing your name across a noisy room

Load theory

The locus of selection depends on how demanding the attended task is; high load → early filtering, low load → spillover

Ex: The X among letters task: the irrelevant N is processed more under low load

Perceptual load

High load from difficult perceptual demands; nontarget processing is diminished

Ex: Degraded faces → lowest scene activity in the PPA

Working memory load

High load from taxing working memory; nontarget processing increases

Ex: The “two-back” face task → highest scene activity in the PPA

Modulation

Attention changes the way we perceive a stimulus, increasing perceptual sensitivity

Ex: Enhances spatial resolution, motion sensitivity, and contrast

Gabor patches

Circular areas of undulating dark and light stripes; contrast and stripe width can vary

Ex: The cued patch was perceived as higher in contrast

Vigilance

Heightened attentional anticipation that lets us better respond to stimuli before they appear

Ex: A sprinter with a “3, 2, 1, GO!” countdown

Continuous performance task

A test of vigilance requiring people to stay on task for a prolonged period

Ex: Press a key whenever X follows A; sleep loss impairs it; airport baggage screeners

Attentional network task (ANT)

A task that taps orienting, alerting, and executive networks in one session using arrows with flankers and cues

Ex: Executive = incongruent RT minus congruent RT

Inattentional blindness

Failing to notice an unexpected item right in front of your eyes when attention is preoccupied

Ex: The gorilla video; about 25% missed the object in Mack & Rock’s cross task; 83% of radiologists missed the gorilla

Change blindness

Failure to notice large changes from one view to the next

Ex: Door study: 53% missed that the stranger had changed; the flicker task

RSVP task

Rapid serial visual presentation: finding targets in a very rapid sequence of items

Ex: ten items per second in the attentional blink task

Attentional blink

The second of two targets is harder to detect than the first, especially within about a half-second

Ex: Two-stage model: early identification, then consolidation in visual short-term memory

Explicit attention

Measures that probe conscious awareness

Ex: Asking what people saw

Implicit attention

Measures that rely on nonconscious indicators lie response time or eye movements

Ex: Faster responses after an unreported cue

Blindsight

Patients with visual cortex damage can sometimes respond to and localize stimuli they report not seeing

Ex: Cues in the blind field speed responses without awareness) attention is necessary but not sufficient for awareness

Gist

The overall idea of a scene, processed faster than details

Ex: Helps explain why we feel we see a rich world despite attending to only ~4 items

Attentional capture

Research on the kinds of stimuli that can draw our attention reflexively

Ex: A unique-color distractor slowing research

Saliency map

A topographical representation, formed early in processing, of relative differences between visual signals; high-salience items capture attention automatically

Ex: The additional singleton task; the effect persisted over 2,000+ trials

Contextual cueing

Faster target finding in repeated spatial configurations than novel ones, often without awareness

Ex: People learn pattern they don’t know exist

Attentional bias

The tendency to direct attention to some types of stimuli over others

Ex: Anxious people attending to threat

Emotion-driven attentional bias

A preference to attend to emotional stimuli

Ex: Faster responses at the location of a threatening picture

Dot probe task

A target appears at one of two locations just after a threatening and a nonthreatening stimulus occupied them

Ex: Anxious participants respond faster at the threat location (within about 1/2s)

Attentional bias modification

Research into the effectiveness of attentional retraining to overcome biases

Ex: Training people to disengage from threat; evidence is mixed

Emotion-induced blindness

Inability to find a target that appears within about a half-second after a task-irrelevant emotional picture

Ex: Missing the rotated landscape in a rapid stream (Fig. 4.17)

Value-modulated attentional capture

Counterproductive, relatively reflexive capture by stimuli signaling reward or punishment

Ex: Slower responses when a distractor signaled high money at stake

Broaden-and-build theory

Positive emotions widen the range of information attended to; negative emotions such as anxiety narrow it

Ex: Positive film clips → more global matches in the global-local task; desserts (high approach motivation) broaden less than funny cats

Preattentive threat detection module

The suggestion that evolution equipped us to detect threats before attending to them

Ex: Snake- and spider-phobic participants found their feared target regardless of display size; counter-evidence under high perceptual load