Attention & Motion

Treisman's Attenuation Theory of Attentional Selection

Psychological theory that proposes that attention allows items that match our goals to be fully represented. Other items are still represented, but are reduced in strength.

Desimone & Dunca’s Biased Competition Theory

• Neuroscientific theory that proposes that all available items compete for representation.

• Attention enhances signals associated with the attended item at all levels of representation and diminishes signals associated with other items at all levels of competition.

• Cell in V4

• RF in lower left visual quandrant

Treisman’ Feature Integration Theory

Proposes that attention is a stage of processing. Prior to attention, all perceptual features are represented, but they are not bound together into coherent objects. After attention processes an item, its features are bound together.

Deutsch & Deutsch's (late selection) filter theory

• Attention operates at a decision stage; inefficient; selection occurs after meaning has been processed

• Proposes that attention allows many or all stimuli to be processed to the point of extracting meaning, and then attention operates at the level of decision making to influence what information is available

Broadbent's (early selection) filter theory

• hard filter that filters out extraneous stuff and only things we’re looking for makes it past the filter

• Proposes that attention only allows stimuli whose physical characteristics match our goals to be processed to the point of extracting meaning.

Goal-driven/top-down/Endogeneous

A Posner cueing task uses a cue at central visual fixation (like an arrow or a color) to indicate that the target will be in a particular location. This cue is 90% valid--that is, it is telling the truth on 9 out of 10 trials, but the target is actually elsewhere on 1 out of 10 trials.

Bottom-up/Salience-driven/Exogeneous

A Posner cueing task uses a cue in one of the potential target locations (like a brief flash) to indicate that the target will be in that location. This cue has chance validity (that is, for two potential target locations, the cue is telling the truth half of the time and lying half of the time).

Value-driven/Selection History

A two-stage task starts out by having participants report something about an item with a particular color. The important color changes from trial to trial, and participants are told at the start of each trial what the important color is on that trial and how much they will be rewarded for correct performance. In a second stage, color is no longer relevant at all -- but colors that were previously strongly rewarded are more distracting than colors that were previously less- or un-rewarded.

Goal-driven/Top-driven/Endogeneous

You, a novice birdwatcher, go for a walk in the woods with your binoculars, your experienced birdwatcher friend, and the goal of spotting a rare wood thrush. You and your friend find a nice spot to wait and watch for birds. Your friend notices you looking up at the trees but tells you that the wood thrush is more often found on the ground, so you start watching the ground instead of the trees.

Serial

Occurs one item at a time

Ex: writing down notes, one word of at a time

Limited-Capacity Parallel

a process happen a few items at a time

Ex: eating blueberries by putting 3 or 4 in your mouth in your at time

Unlimited-Capacity Parallel

A process can handle as manyyy items at possible at once

Ex: you hearing multiple instruments playing at once or multiple people in a cafeteria

Feature Search

A visual search where the number of distractors does not effect the quickness of the search (efficient)

Conjunction Search

The more distractors, the slower the search (ineffieficent)

A Reichardt detector is a circuit model of a motion-sensitive cell that (5 points):

• explains apparent motion

• explains sensitivity to motion direction

• includes a delay

• includes two receptive fields

• explains sensitivity to motion speed

Saccade

A rapid eye movement jumping from one point to another

Smooth pursuit

A slow eye movement following a moving object

Area MT

Brain structure that seems to lead out awareness of motion

Bimodal neuron

A neuron that can have a hand-centered visual receptive field

Mirror neuron

A neuron that responds to watching someone else perform an action and you performing the actio yourself

Motion opponent

Receives input from two Reichardt detectors such that it increases its firing rate for one direction of motion and decreases its firing rate for the opposite direction of motion.

Indicators fo biological motion

• Piecewise rigidity

• Sudden changes in motion/direction

• Smooth pursuit

• Having no obvious external cause for changes in motion

Prime

A stimulus that might make it easier or faster to respond to a subsequent stimulus

Ex: if you see the word cat, you are ____ to respond to words associated, like “mouse” or “dog”, faster than “blanket.”

William James defines attention as:

• “taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one objects or trains of thought

• implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others

• “ and the foreground of consciousness is

  filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of

  surrender to the empty passing of time.”

• Principles of Psychology 1890

The “essence” of attention described by William James (1890) is:

Focalization, concentration, and consciousness

Focalization

• Selective attention

• Processing some information more than (or instead of) other info

Concentration

• sustained attention or vigilance

• remaining engaged in the task at hand; avoiding mind-wandering

Consciousness

Awareness; related to attention, but not identical to awareness

A capacity limit

A maximum rate of processing or quantity of representation within some system

Ex: capacity limit of eating dinner stems from the size of your mouth and the rate at which you can chew your food

Research in perception primarily focuses on this ________

Selective Attention

Attention as a label for _________ and the way we allocate resources to tasks or sources of information helps explain ____ ____ ____ ____

limited-capacity resources; why we need attention

Before vision, selective attention was studied in ______

Audition

• Dichotic listening

• Cocktail party effect (Cherry 1953)

• Change blindness (ex: passing the basketball and the monkey)

• Inattentional blindness

…and lwky time

• attentional blink

Attentionl Blink

A temporary reduction in the ability to notice or identify a second target stimulus (T2) if it appears between 200 and 500 milliseconds after a first target stimulus (T1) in a rapid stream of information

Attentional Blink diagrams

Remaining conflict with early selection theory

• only the stimuli to which you attend are processed to the point of extracting meaning

• But then how does something you don’t intend to attend ever grab your attention? Like, if your attention needs to switch bc of a car alarm

• Moray (1959) showed that under dichotic listening conditions, the participant’s own name could capture their attention from the ignored ear…

Perceptual Load theory

• agree that the locus of selection is dynamic. Selection may be early or late depending on task and other circumstances.

Overt

We move our eyes to the relevant place, fixating it

Say, “Hey, look over there!”

Covertly

• We shift attention without moving our eyes

• Says ,“Hey, don’t look so they notice you, but can you believe what those people over there are wearing.”

Many studies of visual attention focus on _______ attention in order to study attention separately from eye movements

Covert

Attentional Priority Map

the integration of different features and different kinds of attentional control (top-down, bottom-up, value-driven/selection history)

Posterior parietal cortex

Where attentional priority maps found in the brain

Biased competition

study this

Attending to an object/location/feature

• increases neural activity in cells/brain regions

sensitive to that object/location/feature.

• makes neural signals appear more like the attended item is the only object/location/feature on display.

The binding problem

How do we link together the distributed (across

neural representations) featural components of an

item’s representation into a coherent whole?

Feature integration theory (FIT)

• Anne Treisman’s theory of visual attention, which holds that a limited set of basic features can be processed in parallel preattentively, but other properties, including the correct binding of features to objects, require attention.

Scene Gist

our strange ability to be aware of the high-level meaning of a scene under conditions in which there is insufficient attention to make low-level discriminations