the attending brain (notes)

limitations of attention

IS limited

uses of attention

concentration, selecting information, inhibiting information, monitoring a goal set

orienting

moving of shifting focus

overt

your area of attention or focus is obvious

covert

your area of attention of focus is not what is obvious

posner’s spotlight of visual attention

overall half of the trail had a cue, and half had a neutral cue. the correct direction of indication had 80% of valid trials, whereas invalid trials had 20%.

exogenous cueing

external stimulus directs attention

endogenouts cueing

guided by perceiver

inhibition of return

after a delay, attention shifts away from cued location and object

stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA)

time between offset of cue and onset of target

targets and distractors

when similar it takes longer to find the items cued for

serial search

used when distractors are similars

parallel search

used when characters are distractors are dissimilar

non-spatial attention (face vs place task)

activation in the fusiform face area (FFA) when focusing on the face and activation in the parahippocampal place area (PPA) when focuins on the building

inferior frontal junction

FFA and PPA are selectively active in relattion to the IFJ

inattentional blindness

missing an event, “not seeing something” right in front of you is attention is directly elsewhere

change blindness

failure to notice changes if they happen during a saccade and images are oresented between a blank screen

saccade

fast movement of the eyes from one place to another

attentional blink

in rapid serial visual presentation of stimuli

dorsal dorsal stream

orienting within a salience map, orienting based on degree of salience

lateral intraparietal area

respond to salient stimuli and involved in planning eye movements

frontal eye field (FEF)

part of frontal lobes responsible for voluntary movement of the eyes

orienting attention

responds to cue

ventro dorsal

a “circuit breaker”, disrupts current cognitive activity to direct attention to something else

temporoparietal junction

active when waiting for a stimulus change

ventrofrontal cortex

involved in shifting attention away from current to new stimulus

hemispheric difference

RH dominant for spatial attention, more focus on the left

right hemisphere attending

salient stimulus

left hemisphere attending

nonsalient stimulus

hemispatial neglect

patients fail to attend to objects on the opposite side of space to the lesion (more common with RHS lesions)

perception

organization and interpretation of information coming from senses

attention

selecting of information

awareness

ones conscious state of experience

attention and perception are linked

attenetion operates on information coming from the senses

attention and awareness are linked

subset of information can be reports

perception and awareness are linked

we are sometimes conscious of perceptually salient information

weak stimulus and absent attention

very little activation, little or no priming, and no reportability

weak stimulus and present attention

strong feedforward activation, short lived priming, semantic level, no reportability

sufficiently strong stimulus and preconscious attention

intense activation that is confined to the sensorimotor, priming at multiple levels, now reportability while attention is occupied elsewhere

sufficiently strong stimulus and conscious

orientation of top down processing, intense activation that spreads, long sitance loops and global synchrony, and conscious reportability

phenomenal consciousness

the feeling of a sensation, the content of awareness

access consciousness

the ability to report on the content of awareness

feature integration theory (FIT)

how attention selects perceptual objects and binds the different features of those objects

feature search

looking for specific detail and outliers when given a prompt

early selection

information is selected based on perceptual features

late selection

selection is based on meaning

dichotic listening task

one listening and responding to one stimuli entering the assigned ear

negative priming and attentional selection

ignoring one stimulus in order to respond to the other