CH 4 Reading Notes

Attention is capacity-limited

We are limited in how much information we can select at any one time.

Inattentional blindness

The failure to see something you are looking right at because your attention is otherwise preoccupied.

Reflexive shifts of attention

They tend to be involuntary, originate exogenously, and are transient.

Biased competition

Findings that stimuli within the same receptive field compete to drive activity in the visual system, with attention resolving the competition.

Feature-based attention

Looking for yellow objects when searching for bananas in a supermarket.

Dichotic listening task

Participants were often unaware of what was said on the ignored channel.

Attenuator model of attention

Some information can reach awareness even when it is in an unattended channel, particularly if it is personally meaningful.

Attentional modulation

Attention to a stimulus can alter how we see its properties.

Vigilance

Lapses in attention may cause rare but dangerous events to be missed.

Attentional network task

Sensitivity to visual contrast is not one of the aspects it measures.

Change blindness

You do not notice that the waiter who brings you your food is a different person than the waiter who took your order.

Explicit attention

Inattentional blindness, change blindness, and the attentional blink can be regarded as measures of explicit attention.

Saliency maps

Explain why not all exogenous cues attract attention equally.

Anxious participants

More likely to have their attention captured by threatening stimuli.