Attention Lecture

where they’re looking; looking in one direction is the most direct way to shift attention; without periphery you can't read (means focus comes mostly from fovea)

bilateral damage to the parietal/occipital junction that result in a set of symptoms: optic ataxia, ocular apraxia, simultanagnosia

the ability to direct attention without overt alterations or changes in sensory receptors (ex: attending to a conversation without turning the eyes/head toward the speaker) [Helmholtz]

the idea that even in a crowded, stimulus filled room, a person can pay attention to one thign

used by Cherry to test the cocktail party effect; provided competing speech inputs to the two ears of a normal subject through headphones --- subject had to shadow L-ear story and ignore R-ear inputs

subjects are told to only stare at fixation point (FP); cue in the form of an arrow appears & points to L or R; then a box [target] appears on the L or R; people are faster to correctly say which side box is on during a valid trial [target indicated by cue] than an invalid trial [target not indicated by cue]

cuing that results in the focusing of attention based on the subjects goals (ex: perform the task as instructed)

attention is controlled by low-level features of external stimuli and not by internal voluntary control

clearly show the effects of covert spatial attention (because the subjects weren't allowed to move their eyes); and shows that subjects were faster to detect the target when the arrow tells the truth; this difference in reaction time is a result of difference in attention; shifting attention requires time (which is very similar to the amount of time it takes to make eye movement)

type of search where the time it takes to determine whether a target's present/absent in an array increases with the numer of distracters present; utilizes attentive attention Triesman's experiment

a form of attention used in a conjunctive search that takes a long amount of time because attention must be deployed in a sequential/serial manner through the array to find the target

a form of attention used in a pop-out search that takes a short amount of time (independent of the number of distractors) because target can be identified by a single feature (ex: color)

a flat search function that utilizes preattentive search and where reaction time doesn't increase as a function of set size; target can be identified only by a single feature

patients may neglect the left visual field (as if they can't see it); ex: shown in patients who when they try to draw a figure, can only draw one side or another; a main impairment is seen when you present stimuli (sound or visual) on both sides of visual field at the same time

you don’t get neglect of the right visual field (RVF); people think this is because the L. hemisphere represents RVF, and the R. hemisphere represents both LVF and RVF

inability to recognize more than one object shown at the same time; disturbance of visual attention; ex: a patient can see each object presented (ex: comb and spoon) but fails to see them all together

inability to move the hand to an object using vision; symptom of Balint's Syndrome

inability to voluntarily control the gaze

is 1) feature driven (feed forward coming from feature maps in Triesman’s theory; something about the item is conspicuous that makes you attend to it 2) reflextive/automatic; 3) exogenous

moves from higher order areas to lower visual areas; it's goal or experience driven; involves a VOLUNTARY shift of attention (depends on effort put in); and is endogenous: internally directed; slower than bottom-up

contains a map of neurons (retinotopically-coded when the eyes are fixed) representing the saliency of spatial locations and attention to these spatial locations; it can be used by the oculomotor system for targeting eye movements

• ·LIP used
• to be thought to be important for eye movements --- now known to be important
• for attention, because you get the same effects without moving your eyes