NE 202 MIDTERM EXAM 2 STUDY GUIDE Q & A 2023
1. Endogenous vs Exogenous Attention
a. Endogenous
a.i. Voluntary attention- for example, directing your attention to stimuli at the
request of research administrator.
b. Exogenous
b.i. Reflexive attention- for example, if a loud noise came from behind you,
you would attend to it.
2. Dorsal and Ventral Attentional Control Systems
a. Concept that there are two separate attentional networks in the brain
a.i. Dorsal
a.i.1. Attentional Control
a.i.2. Dorsal Frontal Parietal Network
a.i.3. Controls endogenous shifts (voluntary)
a.i.4. Intraparital Sulcus (IPs)/ Frontal eye fields (FEF) regions
responsible for controlling these top-down voluntary shifts
a.ii. Ventral
a.ii.1. Novelty and reorienting
a.ii.2. Right ventral system responsible for reorienting
a.ii.3. Exogenous shifting (reflexive)
a.ii.4. Temporal parietal junction (TPJ) / Ventral Frontal Cortex
(VFC) responsible for stimulus driven control
3. Covert vs. Overt Attention
a. High degree of overlap in attentional networks.
b. Covert
b.i. Brain Structure: Pulvinar
b.i.1. Participates in filtering out distractor
b.i.2. Not involving eye movements, shifts in attention are
similar to saccadic eye movements, but your eyes don’t move.
b.i.3. Study: Frontal Eye Field stim influences V4 in Covert
attention
b.i.3.a. Monkeys asked to attend to a fixation point in
visual field and attend to bars in visual field. Monkeys
showed response to bars in V4 RF without moving
eyes/showing stimulation in movement neurons,
showing that covert and overt attention may be able to
be separated, disproving the premotor theory of attention
c. Overt
c.i. Actually shifting your eyes/attention explicitly
4. Change Blindness
a. Phenomenon of looking but not seeing.
b. Relies on exogenous, voluntary attention.
b.i. If there was something missing in Photo B that was in Photo A, we would
only notice it was gone if the object was something we had been
voluntarily attending to in the first place.
b.ii. Like monkey video: didn’t notice the monkey because we weren’t
attending to it
b.ii.1. Transients (aka rapid changes) can be masked by other
transients.
, 5. Inattentional Blindness
a. Much like change blindness, but the difference is that intentional blindness is not
noticing a subtle, unexpected change about the photo.
6. Feature Selection Mechanisms
a. Stimuli moving in a preferred direction/ shape/color (aka stimuli with the desired
feature) within the receptive field raises the attentional index. Stimuli that also
have the preferred features but do not pass in front of the receptive field still raise
the attentional index higher than stimuli that do not have preferred features
outside of receptive field.
7. Object Selection mechanisms
a. Different parts of the brain make us pay attention to different stuff.
b. FFA- face recognition
c. Lateral occipital lobe/ V4- object recognition
d. These systems help us recognize objects and faces, but also help us ignore the
ones we don’t want to pay attention to.
8. Spatial Selection Mechanisms
a. There is only a certain amount of spatial perceptual load that you can attend to at
once.
b. MT is the brain region responsible for notion
c. Wherever you’re paying attention to is where your neurons are firing.
d. Visual spatial attention modulated retinoptically specific regions of primary and
other early visual cortex.
9. Spatial Cuing
a. Using covert attention, without moving your eyes, you will notice something on
the right quicker if you are cued to it on the right beforehand.
10. Spotlight of attention
a. If you’re paying attention to one thing in your visual field you’ll kind of zoom in on
it, and exclude other things in your visual field.
11. Cocktail Party Effect
a. Selectively focusing on one voice and simultaneously blocking out all the others.
b. You can only listen to one conversation at a time, if there are two speakers, one
in one ear and one in another, and you are assed to say what is being said
aloud, you wont process the info in the non attention ear, you couldn’t tell if the
language was changed, if they started talking backwards, or if their grammar got
horrible. But you could tell if the pitch of their voice changed, the intonation, and
the speaker’s gender.
c.
12. Reorientation of attention
a. Using your TPJ and VFC your right ventral system reorients attention.
b. Reorienting- invalid cue, and your TPJ activate to reorients you.
13. Key Properties of Attention
14. Spatial Neglect
a. Hemispatial
a.i. Right Hemisphere damage, parietal or frontal lobes
a.ii. Leads to a neglect to the left side of space, almost exclusively.
a.iii. Not a sensory or motor deficit
a.iv. Occurs across sensory modalities.
15. Representational model of neglect
16. Coordinate reference frames of neglect
1. Endogenous vs Exogenous Attention
a. Endogenous
a.i. Voluntary attention- for example, directing your attention to stimuli at the
request of research administrator.
b. Exogenous
b.i. Reflexive attention- for example, if a loud noise came from behind you,
you would attend to it.
2. Dorsal and Ventral Attentional Control Systems
a. Concept that there are two separate attentional networks in the brain
a.i. Dorsal
a.i.1. Attentional Control
a.i.2. Dorsal Frontal Parietal Network
a.i.3. Controls endogenous shifts (voluntary)
a.i.4. Intraparital Sulcus (IPs)/ Frontal eye fields (FEF) regions
responsible for controlling these top-down voluntary shifts
a.ii. Ventral
a.ii.1. Novelty and reorienting
a.ii.2. Right ventral system responsible for reorienting
a.ii.3. Exogenous shifting (reflexive)
a.ii.4. Temporal parietal junction (TPJ) / Ventral Frontal Cortex
(VFC) responsible for stimulus driven control
3. Covert vs. Overt Attention
a. High degree of overlap in attentional networks.
b. Covert
b.i. Brain Structure: Pulvinar
b.i.1. Participates in filtering out distractor
b.i.2. Not involving eye movements, shifts in attention are
similar to saccadic eye movements, but your eyes don’t move.
b.i.3. Study: Frontal Eye Field stim influences V4 in Covert
attention
b.i.3.a. Monkeys asked to attend to a fixation point in
visual field and attend to bars in visual field. Monkeys
showed response to bars in V4 RF without moving
eyes/showing stimulation in movement neurons,
showing that covert and overt attention may be able to
be separated, disproving the premotor theory of attention
c. Overt
c.i. Actually shifting your eyes/attention explicitly
4. Change Blindness
a. Phenomenon of looking but not seeing.
b. Relies on exogenous, voluntary attention.
b.i. If there was something missing in Photo B that was in Photo A, we would
only notice it was gone if the object was something we had been
voluntarily attending to in the first place.
b.ii. Like monkey video: didn’t notice the monkey because we weren’t
attending to it
b.ii.1. Transients (aka rapid changes) can be masked by other
transients.
, 5. Inattentional Blindness
a. Much like change blindness, but the difference is that intentional blindness is not
noticing a subtle, unexpected change about the photo.
6. Feature Selection Mechanisms
a. Stimuli moving in a preferred direction/ shape/color (aka stimuli with the desired
feature) within the receptive field raises the attentional index. Stimuli that also
have the preferred features but do not pass in front of the receptive field still raise
the attentional index higher than stimuli that do not have preferred features
outside of receptive field.
7. Object Selection mechanisms
a. Different parts of the brain make us pay attention to different stuff.
b. FFA- face recognition
c. Lateral occipital lobe/ V4- object recognition
d. These systems help us recognize objects and faces, but also help us ignore the
ones we don’t want to pay attention to.
8. Spatial Selection Mechanisms
a. There is only a certain amount of spatial perceptual load that you can attend to at
once.
b. MT is the brain region responsible for notion
c. Wherever you’re paying attention to is where your neurons are firing.
d. Visual spatial attention modulated retinoptically specific regions of primary and
other early visual cortex.
9. Spatial Cuing
a. Using covert attention, without moving your eyes, you will notice something on
the right quicker if you are cued to it on the right beforehand.
10. Spotlight of attention
a. If you’re paying attention to one thing in your visual field you’ll kind of zoom in on
it, and exclude other things in your visual field.
11. Cocktail Party Effect
a. Selectively focusing on one voice and simultaneously blocking out all the others.
b. You can only listen to one conversation at a time, if there are two speakers, one
in one ear and one in another, and you are assed to say what is being said
aloud, you wont process the info in the non attention ear, you couldn’t tell if the
language was changed, if they started talking backwards, or if their grammar got
horrible. But you could tell if the pitch of their voice changed, the intonation, and
the speaker’s gender.
c.
12. Reorientation of attention
a. Using your TPJ and VFC your right ventral system reorients attention.
b. Reorienting- invalid cue, and your TPJ activate to reorients you.
13. Key Properties of Attention
14. Spatial Neglect
a. Hemispatial
a.i. Right Hemisphere damage, parietal or frontal lobes
a.ii. Leads to a neglect to the left side of space, almost exclusively.
a.iii. Not a sensory or motor deficit
a.iv. Occurs across sensory modalities.
15. Representational model of neglect
16. Coordinate reference frames of neglect
