Lecture 9
Attention
Attention
What is attention?
- Layman’s view -> we are attentive when our minds are directed at something specific.
- Others are a bit more negative -> ill-defined term referring to broad class of ‘attentional
phenomena’.
- Different attentional phenomena might show resemblances, but not property is shared. This
would imply that attention does not exist.
- Vincent Walsh -> the psychologist’s weapon of mass explanation.
- Some are more positive -> attention is the working of a few specific mechanisms; the purpose
of these mechanisms is selectivity.
Three points of view
1. Alerting -> frontal area, posterior area, thalamus.
2. Orienting -> frontal eye field, superior parietal lobe, temporoparietal junction, superior
colliculus, pulvinar.
3. Executive -> prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate gyrus,
Alerting
- This can be very quick and short, it is very basic. Almost the majority of the brain is working
on altering. The midbrain areas, the locus coeruleus, sends signals to the rest of the brain. In
humans, you can look at the pupil to see how awake someone is.
o Vigilance/sustained attention -> reaction times are usually longer in the early
morning and decline over the course of the day only to rise again during the night
and peak in the early morning.
o There is no such thing as an attention curve -> it is not possible to prove one curve
that is the same for every person in every situation.
o You cannot damage one particular area in the brain and a problem in alerting exists.
Orienting
- This is also not one domain. You can make categorizations in many types of attention.
Another term is spotlight attention.
- Reflexive vs. voluntary orienting:
o Bottom op (reflexive) -> fast, peripheral, non-informative cue, stimulus-driven, right
ventro temporal-parietal-inferior frontal.
▪ Ventral attentional system -> bottom-up reorienting.
o Top-down (voluntary) > slow, central symbol, informative cue, goal-directed, dorsal
parietal-superior frontal.
▪ Dorsal attentional system -> top-down visuospatial
- You need attention in order to identify.
1
, - Feature integration theory (Treisman) -> attention selects then binds the features. Attention
then binds them into objects. This binding only occurs with attention. The idea is that if you
see an image for a split second, it is not enough to bind all elements. For example, you see
shaped including a big yellow round, and big blue square, some might say they remember
seeing a yellow square.
- You can change the size of your spotlight. Young children have a difficulty with the large
spotlight. They only focus on small details. Old people have a large spotlight.
- You can determine what is in your feature-based perception -> for example you think about
something red, red will automatically catch your attention. So, feature-based attention works
for all the features. Thus, you can, for example, select things based on colors. You can also
base things on the location, which is called location-based attention.
- There is object-based and space-based attention:
o Object-based -> attention only selects regions of space that are occupied by objects. If
you are cued by a particular object, the reaction time will be longer if you need to find
something not the same as the cued object.
o Space-based -> attention selects empty regions of space independent of the object
they contain (spotlight metaphor).
- Sensory memory -> first tab of visual processing. You cannot report it, but is still influences
your awareness. You can not access it. A part is attended and goes to your short-term
memory.
- Visuospatial sketchpad -> memory of the information around you.
o Spatial working memory -> attention system. Where is relevant information in the
world around me? These spotlights are called attentional pointers.
o Visual working memory -> visual things that you think about. If you think about
red, you store red in your visual working memory. It is used to retain relevant
information for imminent goal-directed behavior. The idea is that you use the low-
level visual systems when you are holding something in the visual working memory
-> called sensory recruitment. Perception is very much based in what we keep in our
memory (things like priming, things your thinking about at the moment).
Neglect
Neglect -> the failure (or slowness) to report, respond, or orient to novel or meaningful stimuli
presented to the side opposite a brain lesion, when this failure cannot be attributed to either sensory
or motor defect. Even when moving eyes or hands to the neglected side the items presented there do
not reach awareness. Patients behave as if one half of their world has ceased to exist. Individuals do
not have blindness, but do not attend to information, and thus cannot act, think, and report on the
information. It does not reach working memory.
- There are different tests for neglect -> it depends on what you are interest which test you
choose.
o Line bisection task -> there is only search here. This is just a test of perception.
o Star test -> task is to cross out the small stars, so there is a target. Here is competition
between items. There are items you need to ignore. This is more spatial; it measures
where you have visited before. Sometimes, people cross out something for the
second, because they forget they already have been there.
2
Attention
Attention
What is attention?
- Layman’s view -> we are attentive when our minds are directed at something specific.
- Others are a bit more negative -> ill-defined term referring to broad class of ‘attentional
phenomena’.
- Different attentional phenomena might show resemblances, but not property is shared. This
would imply that attention does not exist.
- Vincent Walsh -> the psychologist’s weapon of mass explanation.
- Some are more positive -> attention is the working of a few specific mechanisms; the purpose
of these mechanisms is selectivity.
Three points of view
1. Alerting -> frontal area, posterior area, thalamus.
2. Orienting -> frontal eye field, superior parietal lobe, temporoparietal junction, superior
colliculus, pulvinar.
3. Executive -> prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate gyrus,
Alerting
- This can be very quick and short, it is very basic. Almost the majority of the brain is working
on altering. The midbrain areas, the locus coeruleus, sends signals to the rest of the brain. In
humans, you can look at the pupil to see how awake someone is.
o Vigilance/sustained attention -> reaction times are usually longer in the early
morning and decline over the course of the day only to rise again during the night
and peak in the early morning.
o There is no such thing as an attention curve -> it is not possible to prove one curve
that is the same for every person in every situation.
o You cannot damage one particular area in the brain and a problem in alerting exists.
Orienting
- This is also not one domain. You can make categorizations in many types of attention.
Another term is spotlight attention.
- Reflexive vs. voluntary orienting:
o Bottom op (reflexive) -> fast, peripheral, non-informative cue, stimulus-driven, right
ventro temporal-parietal-inferior frontal.
▪ Ventral attentional system -> bottom-up reorienting.
o Top-down (voluntary) > slow, central symbol, informative cue, goal-directed, dorsal
parietal-superior frontal.
▪ Dorsal attentional system -> top-down visuospatial
- You need attention in order to identify.
1
, - Feature integration theory (Treisman) -> attention selects then binds the features. Attention
then binds them into objects. This binding only occurs with attention. The idea is that if you
see an image for a split second, it is not enough to bind all elements. For example, you see
shaped including a big yellow round, and big blue square, some might say they remember
seeing a yellow square.
- You can change the size of your spotlight. Young children have a difficulty with the large
spotlight. They only focus on small details. Old people have a large spotlight.
- You can determine what is in your feature-based perception -> for example you think about
something red, red will automatically catch your attention. So, feature-based attention works
for all the features. Thus, you can, for example, select things based on colors. You can also
base things on the location, which is called location-based attention.
- There is object-based and space-based attention:
o Object-based -> attention only selects regions of space that are occupied by objects. If
you are cued by a particular object, the reaction time will be longer if you need to find
something not the same as the cued object.
o Space-based -> attention selects empty regions of space independent of the object
they contain (spotlight metaphor).
- Sensory memory -> first tab of visual processing. You cannot report it, but is still influences
your awareness. You can not access it. A part is attended and goes to your short-term
memory.
- Visuospatial sketchpad -> memory of the information around you.
o Spatial working memory -> attention system. Where is relevant information in the
world around me? These spotlights are called attentional pointers.
o Visual working memory -> visual things that you think about. If you think about
red, you store red in your visual working memory. It is used to retain relevant
information for imminent goal-directed behavior. The idea is that you use the low-
level visual systems when you are holding something in the visual working memory
-> called sensory recruitment. Perception is very much based in what we keep in our
memory (things like priming, things your thinking about at the moment).
Neglect
Neglect -> the failure (or slowness) to report, respond, or orient to novel or meaningful stimuli
presented to the side opposite a brain lesion, when this failure cannot be attributed to either sensory
or motor defect. Even when moving eyes or hands to the neglected side the items presented there do
not reach awareness. Patients behave as if one half of their world has ceased to exist. Individuals do
not have blindness, but do not attend to information, and thus cannot act, think, and report on the
information. It does not reach working memory.
- There are different tests for neglect -> it depends on what you are interest which test you
choose.
o Line bisection task -> there is only search here. This is just a test of perception.
o Star test -> task is to cross out the small stars, so there is a target. Here is competition
between items. There are items you need to ignore. This is more spatial; it measures
where you have visited before. Sometimes, people cross out something for the
second, because they forget they already have been there.
2
