Cognitive Neuroscience

A cogntive system that allows for preferential processing of relevant information while ignoring irrelevant or distracting information

• Alerting
• Orienting
• Monitoring

• Alerting: Anxiety
• Orienting: Depression
• Monitoring: ADHD

active interplay between internal and external stimuli for attention

early vs late

• Vigilance: ability to retain alertness continuously over time (sustained attention)
• Arousal: (involves ANS, SNS)
• Overall level of wakefulness

Measured with: Galvanic Skin Response

• Brain regions involved:
• Reticular Activating System
• cell bodies of the pons and medulla

• Hyper-alerting: panic anxiety
• Hypo-alerting: ignore dangerous stimuli

• Selectively some info for futher processing at the expense of other stimuli
• Broadbent's info processing bottleneck
• Attenuation Theory (Triesman): Processing of info at the unattended channel is diminished, while processing increases as the ignore info becomes relevant to the task at hand

• Tests:
• Dichotic Listening Task
• Shadowing Task

• information comes in both ears and told to attend to one of the channels.
• Much of message from unattended is not "heard"

Sensory input->Perceptual Analysis->Semantic Analysis->Response selection and execution

Ability to focus one's attention on a single speaker in a cacophony of conversations and background noise

• Items pass through the unattended channel if they have some semantic meaning
• -our name
• -sex words
• -george carlin words

greater attenuation for neutral

lets us control for perceptual input and eye movement

must actively decide to put your attention there, larger cuing effect (difference between invalid and valid)

• brigher luminance or larger target
• stimulus draws attention itself
• smaller attentional cuing effect

Difference between the neutral and invalid conditions

Difference between neural and valid conditions

Difference between the invalid and valid conditions

• Early (perceptual):
• 1. not able to remember information from unattended channel
• 2. perceptual factors influence attentional cuing effects

• Late (Response selection)
• breakthrough phenomenon/attenuation theory