SPA Exam 3

Is there any widely accepted definition of attention?

Not really

Is attention sustained or temporary?

Both

When is attention overt?

when move our eyes to look at something

When is attention covert?

when we listen without moving our eyes toward what we're listening to

When is attention voluntary?

when we concentrate on something or involuntary like when we flinch at a loud noise

What do we usually align our attention with?

our direction of gaze but we can also attend to spatial locations other than the location we are looking at

Who investigated the phenomenon that we usually align our attention with our direction of gaze?

Posner

Who conducted the famous gorilla experiment?

Chabris and Simons (1999)

What did the gorilla experiment demonstrate?

that salient stimuli can actually be missed when the focus of attention is elsewhere

What tends to capture our attention?

Both a history of previous reward and relevant semantic meaning

What does binocular rivalry result in?

perceptual bistability

What ability do infants show from quite a young age?

the ability to maintain the direction of gaze, indicating some attentional control.

What is one-way attention is studied in infants?

the oddball paradigm

Studying attention often means measuring what?

human performance in terms of the speed and efficiency at which something can be done.

Visual search tasks like Where's Waldo and flight simulators are examples of what?

contexts where we could measure response times and error rates.

What is considered to be a rough measure of practice or expertise?

Being fast and accurate

What do direct perception theories emphasize?

environmental properties that guide our movements, Like gradient flow and focus of expansion. When we move forward, the environment appears to move toward us, that's called optic flow. Recent artificial intelligence development in the area of autonomous vehicles has had really good success navigating according to these kinds of principles.

What do birds use to avoid colliding with each other?

Optic flow

Touch and pressure sensations are what?

transduced by specialized sensory receptors, such as Meissner corpuscles and Pacinian corpuscles

Transduction of temperature occurs through the activation or inhibition of what?

thermoreceptor channels, leading to the generation of electrical signals that are relayed to the brain.

What does pain perception involve?

Nociceptors

What do nociceptors detect?

noxious stimuli, such as mechanical pressure, extreme temperature, or chemical irritants. Different types of nociceptors, including thermal nociceptors, mechanical nociceptors, and polymodal nociceptors, transduce different types of pain stimuli

Nociceptors convert noxious stimuli into what?

electrical signals through the activation of ion channels, resulting in the generation of action potentials that are transmitted to the brain.

Muscle spindles detect changes in what?

muscle length

Golgi tendon organs detect changes in what?

muscle tension

Joint receptors detect changes in what?

joint position

Transduction in proprioception involves the activation of what?

proprioceptors and the conversion of mechanical stimuli into electrical signals. These signals are then transmitted to the brain, contributing to our perception of body position, movement, and coordination.

Proprioception relies on what?

proprioceptors, including muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs, and joint receptors

What can cause itching?

various causes, including skin conditions, allergic reactions, dryness, insect bites, and certain systemic diseases

What is itching also known as?

Pruritus

While the exact pruriceptor types are not fully defined, research suggests that they may include what?

specialized C-fiber sensory neurons, which transmit the itch signals to the brain

Transduction of itch begins when?

various pruritogens, substances that induce itching, interact with pruriceptors

What can pruritogens include?

histamine, proteases, opioids, and certain cytokines

When pruritogens bind to specific receptors on pruriceptors, they initiate a cascade of biochemical events, resulting in the activation of what?

ion channels and the generation of electrical signals; These electrical signals are then transmitted to the spinal cord and eventually relayed to the brain, where the sensation of itching is perceived

What is the flow of an itch?

Pruritogens bind to specific receptors on pruriceptors > activation of ion channels and the generation of electrical signals > transmitted to spinal cord > relayed in brain where sensation of itch is perceived

Itch signaling is known to involve the release of specific neuropeptides, such as what?

substance P and gastrin-releasing peptide (GRP), which contribute to the transmission and modulation of itch signals

Attention

a set of processes that allow us to select or focus on some stimuli; or also attention is a set of processes that allow us to selectively focus our awareness on particular stimuli

Attentional blink

the tendency to respond more slowly or not at all to the second target in an RSVP task when the second stimulus occurs within 500 ms of the first stimulus

Attentional capture

occurs when a salient stimulus causes us to shift attention to that stimulus

Automaticity

refers to those processes that do not require attention

Bálint’s syndrome

a neurological condition caused by damage to both left and right posterior parietal lobes

Change blindness

the difficulty we experience in detecting differences between two visual stimuli that are identical except for one or more changes to the image

Conjunction search

searching for a target in which the target is specified by a combination of features

Covert attention

when your visual direction does not line up with your direction of gaze

Divided attention

the process of attending to multiple sources of information

Feature integration theory

stipulates that some features can be processed in parallel and quickly prior to using attentional resources

Feature search

searching for a target in which the target is specified by a single feature

Hemifield neglect (unilateral visual neglect)

a condition in which a person fails to attend to stimuli on one side of the visual world (usually the left) as a consequence of neurological damage to the posterior parietal lobe

Inattentional blindness

a phenomenon in which people fail to perceive an object or event that is visible but not attended to

Orienting attention network (dorsal attention network)

a neural system, located primarily in the parietal lobe, that allows us to engage in visual search and direct our visual attention to different locations in visual space

Overt attention

when our attention is directed with our gaze, and covert attention is when our attention is directed toward our periphery

Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm

show that people can respond quickly to a particular stimulus when it occurs in time; an experimental paradigm in which a series of stimuli appear rapidly in time at the same point in visual space. Participants must direct their attention across the time domain rather than the space domain

Repetition blindness

the failure to detect the second target in an RSVP task when the second target is identical to the first one; occurs when the second target is presented 500 ms or less after the first target

Selective attention

the processes of attention that allow us to focus on one source when many are present

Simultagnosia

a deficit in perceiving more than one object at a time

Stimulus salience

some objects in the environment attract our attention

Visual search

looking for a specific target in an image with distracting objects

The orienting reflex

a flinch

Perceptual bistability

a phenomenon in which a static visual image leads to alternating perceptions; as viewers see the image presented to one eye for a while before the perception shifts to what the other eye is viewing.

Binocular rivalry

occurs when a separate image is presented to each eye

Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP)

an experimental paradigm in which a series of stimuli appear rapidly in time at the same point in visual space; Participants must direct their attention across the time domain rather than the space domain; Findings show that people can respond quickly to a particular stimulus when it occurs in time; Participants can even be change blind to the substitution of one person for another.

The oddball paradigm

If infants are shown a series of objects from the same category and then a novel object is presented, the oddball attracts attention. This procedure has shown that infants as young as 4 months will orient toward the novel object (Richards et al., 2010). Also, compared with older children and adults, infants do not seem as distracted by external stimuli, say a television (Setliff & Courage, 2011)