Arousal and Attention

This set of vocabulary flashcards covers concepts from the Arousal and Attention lecture (OTCH 495/595), including neural origins of neurotransmitters, types of attentional shifts, and various attentional systems and theories.

Arousal

Being awake enough to perceive a stimulus; regulated by the Raphe Nuclei and the reticular formation.

Attention is mroe than just ______ and _____

Sensation, perception

There can be _____ _______ in perfectly awake individuals

Attentional, deficits

Attention

Refers to characteristics associated with consciousness, awareness, and cognitive effort.

Attention is a ______ resource

Limited

Arousal

Being awake enough to perceive a stimulus

Reticular Activating System (RAS)

Cells in the reticular formation set the pace of activity for cells throughout the brain.

Raphe Nuclei

The origin of Serotonin, responsible for the sleep-wake cycle and arousal.

Locus coeruleus

Deals with attention, where NE comes from

Pedunculopontine nucleus

The neural origin of Acetylcholine within the consciousness systems.

Substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area

The neural origin of Dopamine: distributes to frontal cortex only

Serotonin

Generalized arousal level

Norepenephrine

Attention (direction of consciousness)

ACH

Selection of object of attention based upon goals

DO

Motivation, motor activity, and cognition

Attentional Orientation / Orienting Reflex

An individual’s immediate response and direction of attention to a novel change or stimulus in its environment.

Sustained attention

Ability to maintain alertness and monitor a stimulus continuously over an increasing period of time

Selective (or focused) attention

Prioritizing attention to one stimulus over others

Divided attention

Dividing attention between $2$ or more different stimuli

Posner & Petersen's 3 stages of Attentional shift

The process of orienting to a new location by first disengaging from current stimuli,

shifting attention,

Then engaging on the new target.

Attentional orientation

Overt vs covert

Overt Orienting

The movement of the eye or head towards a novel stimulus.

Covert Orienting

A shift in attention that occurs without an overt eye or head movement, such as shifting from the road to a thought while driving.

Posterior attentional systems

Systems involved in orienting to visual locations

posterior/superior parietal lobe

Superior colliculus

thalamic lateral pulvinar nucleus

frontal eye fields.

Anterior Attentional System

Neural system associated with attention consisting of the superior colliculus, thalamus, parietal lobe, medial frontal lobe, and lateral prefrontal cortex.

Vigilance

Human performance in this area typically decreases with increasing time due to loss of sensitivity or habituation.

3 Neural subsystems

Reticular activating system, frontal and inferior parietal regions

The cocktail party effect- selective attention

Allows an individual to hone in on critical information from a vast amount of available information.

Width of focus

Focus can be broad or narrow

Direction of focus

Focus can be external or internal

Anterior attentional systems

Sup colliculus, thalamus, parietal lobe, medial frontal lobe, lateral prefrontal cortex

Divided attention is easier to split attention between ______ modalities then two ______ modalities

Different, similar

Attention resources are ______

Limited

Attention resources are _____ depending on the ______ needs

Allocated, processing

You must be ______ to ______ to a task

Aroused, attend

Can be _____ but not able to _____ to a task

Aroused, attend

Filter theory

Bottleneck blocks out bakcground noise so one stream of info gets to the brain

Resource capacity

Attention is limited to an amount of tasks

Central resource capacity

Attention is not one unlimited resource, attention is a shared source

Multiple resource

Attention is not a single pool, there are multiple pools: seeing, hearing, touching