H9 Attending Brain

• Attention

  The process by which certain information is selected for further processing and other information is discarded
• Inattentional blindness


  A failure to be aware of a visual stimulus because attention is directed away from it
• Inattentional blindness


  • Counting passes, not seeing the gorilla on the team
• Change blindness


  A failure to notice the appearance/disappearance of objects between two alternating images
• Salient

  Any aspect of a stimulus that, for whatever reason, stands out from the rest
• Orienting

  The movement of attention from one location to another
• Covert orienting

  The movement of attention from one location to another without moving the eyes/body
• Overt orienting

  Moving the eyes or head along with the focus of attention
• Inhibition of return

  A slowing of reaction time associated with going back to a previously attended location
• Exogenous orienting

  Attention that is externally guided by a stimulus
• Bottom-up process(exo orienting)

  Involuntary movement of action
• Endogenous orienting

  Attention is guided by the goals of the perceiver
• Top-down process

  Voluntary movement of action
• Visual search

  A task of detecting the presence or absence of a specified target object in an array of other distracting objects
• Object-based attention

  The ability to voluntarily shift between different perceptual interpretations of an ambiguous image
• Object-based attention


  • Seeing a face or a house in the same image
• Time-based/temporal attentional processes


  Series of stimuli are presented in succession in same location, if two targets follow closely, target 2 is often missed ('attentional blink')
• Ventral route (or "what" pathway)


  Leading into the temporal lobes, concerned with identifying objects
• Dorsal route (or "where" pathway)


  Leading into the parietal lobes, specialized for locating objects in space
• Lateral intraparietal area (LIP)


  Contains neurons that respond to salient stimuli in the environment and are used to plan eye movements
• Saccade


  A fast, ballistic movement of the eyes
• Salience map


  A spatial layout that emphasizes the most behaviorally relevant stimuli in the environment
• Remapping


  Adjusting one set of spatial coordinates to be aligned with a different coordinate system
• Frontal eye field (FEF)


  Part of the frontal lobes responsible for voluntary movement of the eyes
• Hemispatial neglect


  A failure to attend to stimuli on the opposite side of space to a brain lesion
• Pseudo-neglect


  In a non-lesioned brain there is over-attention to the left side of space
• Attention

  A mechanism for the selection of information
• Awareness


  An outcome (a conscious state) that is, in many theories, linked to the attention mechanism
• Perception


  The information that is selected from and, ultimately, forms the content of awareness
• Phenomenal consciousness


  The "raw" feeling of a sensation, the content of awareness
• Access consciousness


  The ability to report on the content of awareness
• Feature integration theory (FIT)


  If an object does not share features with other objects in the array it appears to pop out, otherwise attention is needed to search all candidates serially
• Illusory conjunctions


  A situation in which visual features of two different objects are incorrectly perceived as being associated with a single object
• Early selection


  A theory of attention in which information is selected according to perceptual attributes
• Late selection


  A theory of attention in which all incoming information is processed up to the level of meaning (semantics) before being selected for further processing
• Negative priming


  If an ignored object suddenly becomes the attended object, then participants are slower at processing it
• Biased Competition Theory

  Attention is an emergent property of many neural mechanisms working to resolve competition for perceptual processing and control of behavior
• Extinction


  In the context of attention, unawareness of a stimulus in the presence of competing stimuli
• Premotor Theory of Attention

  The orienting of attention is nothing more than the preparation for action
• Balint's syndrome


  A severe difficulty in spatial processing normally following bilateral lesions of the parietal lobe; symptoms include simultanagnosia, optic ataxia and optic apraxia