Visual Attention and Action Vocabulary

These flashcards cover vocabulary terms and definitions from chapter 6 and chapter 7 lecture notes.

Task Demands

Sequence of actions involved in a task, determines where people look - actions determine eye movement.

Just In Time Strategy

Eye movements occur just before we need the information they will provide.

Scene Statistics

Probability of various things occurring in a dynamic environment.

Scene Schemas

Our knowledge of the characteristics of specific scenes, influence where we look when we view still pictures.

Spatial Attention

Attention to specific location.

Same-Object Advantage

Faster responding that occurs when enhancement spreads within an object.

Perceived Contrast

How different the light and dark bars appear.

Inattentional Blindness

Subjects can be unaware of clearly visible stimuli if they aren’t directing their attention to them.

Change Blindness

Difficulty in detecting changes in scenes.

Dual-Task Procedure

Subjects are required to carry out simultaneously a central task that demands attention and a peripheral task that involves making a decision about the contents of a scene.

Task-Irrelevant Stimuli

Stimuli that don’t provide information relevant to the task with which we are involved - distracting.

Perceptual Capacity

A person has a certain capacity that can be used for carrying out perceptual tasks.

Perceptual Load

Amount of a person’s perceptual capacity needed to carry out a particular perceptual task.

Binding

Process by which features are combined to create our perception of a coherent object.

Binding Problem

Question of how an object’s individual features become bound together.

Preattentive Stage

Objects are analyzed into separate features.

Illusory Conjunctions

Combinations of features from different stimuli.

Focused Attention Stage

Features are combined.

Visual Search

Looking for an object among a number of other objects.

Feature Search

Finding the target by looking for a single feature.

Conjunction Search

Search for a combination (or conjunction) of two or more features in the same stimulus.

Autism

Developmental disorder in which one of the major symptoms is the withdrawal of contact from other people.

Perceptual Completion

Perception of an object as extending behind occluding objects.

Habituation

One stimulus is presented to the infant repeatedly, and the infant’s looking time is measured on each presentation - as the infant becomes more familiar with the stimulus, he or she habituates to it, looking less and less on each trial.

Dishabituation

Increase in looking time when the stimulus is changed.