4. Attention

Brain Ablation

A lesioning, or damaging, of parts of the brain to see how it affects behaviour

Double Dissociation

The characteristic of two regions of the brain which seem to serve different functions, and/or involve different mechanisms, and operate independently

The Stroop Effect

The interference that arises from competition between relatively automatic processes

• ex, word reading and colour identification

Selective Attention

The ability to focus on one stimulus while ignoring others

Divided Attention

The ability to focus on more than one thing at a time

Sustained Attention

The ability to maintain focus over long periods of time

Spatial Attention

The ability to focus on a specific area of space or location

Dichotic Listenting

An early paradigm used to study control over selectively attending to certain auditory stimuli

Cocktail Party Effect

The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out others

Broadbent’s Filter Model

An early selection model which shows a filter that eliminates unattended information right at the beginning of the flow of information

Treisman’s Attenuation Model

A model that explains how the mind selectively attends to certain information while weakening, rather than completely blocking, unattended stimuli

• attenuator + dictionary unit

Attenuator (Treisman’s Attenuation Model)

A filter that analyzes incoming message in terms of physical characteristics, language, and meaning then separates information into two streams of attended or unattended

Dictionary Unit (Treisman’s Attenuation Model)

A processing component that contains words, each of which have specific (experience-based) thresholds for being activated

• common and important words have low thresholds

• uncommon and unimportant words have high thresholds

Lavie’s Load Theory of Attention

A theory which explains that our ability to ignore distractions depend on the level and type of mental load in the current task

Processing Capacity (Load Theory of Attention)

The amount of information that a system can handle at any given moment

Perceptual Load (Load Theory of Attention)

The difficulty of the perceptual requirements associated with a task

High-load Task (Load Theory of Attention)

A task that uses larger amounts of processing capacity, leaving fewer free resources

• difficult

Low-load Task (Load Theory of Attention)

A task that uses smaller amounts of processing capacity, leaving more free resources

• easy

Eye Tracking

A research method for collecting data related to attention that measures overt attention, namely eye movements

Saccades (Eye Tracking)

Rapid eye movement

Fixations (Eye Tracking)

Short pauses on points of interest

Regressions (Eye Tracking)

The revisiting of something already fixated

Pupil Dilation (Eye Tracking)

Measures an index of autonomic activity

Attentional Capture

Rapid and involuntary shifts of attention resulting from particularly salient properties of stimuli

Scene Schemas

Prior knowledge about what is found in typical scene

Precueing

A providing of a preview as to where or when an stimuli/information may occur

Spatial Attention

Attention bound to specific locations in space

• “attentional spotlight”

Same-object Advantage

A phenomenon where the processing of multiple features or targets occur faster when it belongs to the same single object rather to two different objects

Automatic Processing

Processing that occurs without intention, may not involve conscious awareness, and occurs at a cost of some to none of a person’s cognitive resources

Attentional Warping

A changing in the mapping of categories to specific brain locations to accommodate current goals

Task Switching

A shifting of attention and cognitive resources from one task to another

• comes at a “switch cost” in which behaviour is temporarily slowed down

Multitasking

Attempts to consciously divide attention between multiple tasks while also attempting to switch between those tasks

• typically, its actually just task switching really quickly

Mind Wandering

Off-task thought, task-unrelated thought, stimulus-independent thought, daydreaming

Inattentional Blindness

Instances in which a stimulus that is not attended to is not perceived at all

Load Theory of Attention

A proposal that the ability to ignore task-irrelevant stimuli depends on the load of a person is carrying out

• high-load tasks result in less distraction

Change Blindness

A difficulty in detecting changes in similar, but slight different, scenes that are presented one after another

• the changes are often easy to see once attention is directed to them but are usually undetected in the absence of appropriate attention

Binding

A process by which features are combined to create a perception of coherent objects

Feature Integration Theory (FIT)

An object to object perception that proposes a sequence of stages in which features are first analyzed and then combined to result in perception of an object

• Anne Treisman

Illusory Conjunction

A situation in which features from different objects are inappropriately combined

Preattentive Stage (FIT)

The first stage of FIT in which an object is analyzed into its features and processed automatically

Focused Attention Stage (FIT)

The second stage of FIT that involves the combination of features into perception of an object