Understanding Attention

Attention

• Attention: The brain's mechanism for choosing what to focus on and what to ignore.
• Divided attention: The capability to focus on multiple tasks simultaneously, like talking while cooking.
• Dichotic listening task: Involves playing different sounds or messages in each ear, requiring focus on one ear while ignoring the other.
• Selective attention: Concentrating on one thing and ignoring distractors
• Cocktail party effect: Tracking one conversation while filtering out others, demonstrated by noticing your name mentioned in a noisy room.
• Broadbent's model: An early selection model suggesting attention filters attended stimuli and blocks unattended stimuli. It utilizes the dichotic listening technique.
• Treisman's attenuation model: This model proposes that unattended information is weakened, not completely blocked.
• Stroop task: A task where individuals respond to one aspect of a stimulus.
• Stroop effect: The difficulty and delay in response that occurs because automatic responses interfere with the task. For example, saying the color of the ink when the word spells a different color.
• Bottom-up processing: Stimulus salience, influenced by factors like color and orientation, guides attention to elements in a scene
• Top-down processing: Cognitive processes influenced by observers' goals and prior experiences.
• Inattentional blindness: Concentrating on one thing to the point of missing the unexpected.
• Change blindness: The failure to notice gradual changes in a visual scene.

Illusory Conjunctions and Perception

• Illusory conjunctions: An incorrect combination of features from different stimuli.
• Binding in perception: The process of combining sensory features into a unified object perception.
• Automatic processing: Mental processes occurring without conscious thought due to practice or familiarity.
• Scene schema: Knowledge about what is typically contained in a scene.
• Multitasking: Performing multiple tasks simultaneously, which can reduce performance if tasks require similar cognitive resources.
• Distraction: Anything diverting attention, making multitasking harder.
• Perceptual load: The amount of cognitive resources needed for a task.
• Processing capacity: The total information someone can handle.
• Difference: Perceptual load is a task's demand, while processing capacity is the available mental resources.
• Dichotic listening task: Participants listen to two audio messages, one in each ear, focusing on one.
• Findings: Participants struggle to recall the unattended message but can report physical characteristics (e.g., the speaker's gender or tone).
• P1: The first positive peak in visual ERPs.
• N1: The first negative peak in visual ERPs.
• Automatic processing: occurs without conscious effort.
• Effortful Processing: Requires conscious thought and effort.
• Action slips: Unintentional errors in well-learned tasks due to distractions.
• Caption error: Deviating from a normal routine, forgetting about the change and having to backtrack.

Perception Principles

• Perception: Experiencing the world through sensory stimulation.
• Inverse projection problem: Determining the cause (responsibility) of an image on the retina, complicated by distance and angle variations.
• Viewpoint invariance: Recognizing objects regardless of viewpoint.
• Speech segmentation: Perceiving individual words in continuous speech.
• Likelihood principle: The perceptual system selects the most probable interpretation based on prior knowledge.

Gestalt's Principles and Neural Pathways

• Gestalt's principles of perception: Focuses on how sensory input is organized, e.g., proximity (grouping close objects) and similarity (grouping similar objects).
• Law of Prägnanz: Perceiving the simplest interpretation of an image.
• Perceptual grouping: Organizing objects into groups based on characteristics like proximity and similarity.
• Visual agnosia: Inability to recognize or interpret visual stimuli, despite normal vision.
• Sensory adaptation: Sensory receptors become less sensitive to constant stimuli.
• Dorsal pathway: Processes spatial location and movement ("where"), leading to the parietal lobe.
• Ventral pathway: Processes object identification ("what"), leading to the temporal lobe.
• Mirror neurons: Fire when performing or observing an action.
• Nociceptors: Sensory receptors that detect pain-causing stimuli like tissue damage.
• Prosopagnosia: Inability to recognize faces.

Bayesian Inference and Brain Lobes

• Bayesian inference: Outcome probability determined by prior probability and likelihood.
• Visual neglect: Damage to the right brain side that can cause neglecting the left visual field.
• Frontal Lobe: Decision-making, problem-solving, and motor functions
• Parietal Lobe: Processing sensory information, spatial awareness and coordination
• Temporal Lobe: Involved in hearing, memory, and language comprehension.
• Occipital Lobe: Processes visual information.
• Action slips: Errors in carrying out automatic actions due to distractions.
• Habituation: Becoming less responsive to repeated stimuli.

Imagery

• Imagery: Experiencing sensory impressions without direct sensory input.
• Kosslyn's mental scanning task: Scanning a visualized map or image.
• Results: Scanning time increases with distance between objects in the image.
• Paired-associate learning: Learning and recalling pairs
• Paivio's dual coding theory: Information is encoded both verbally.
• Verbal: (e.g., "apple").
• Nonverbal: (e.g., an image of an apple).
• Shepard and Metzler's “image rotation” experiment: Participants mentally rotated objects to determine if they were the same. This demonstrated that mental imagery is similar to physical perception.
• Kosslyn (1973) find in imagery research: Time to mentally scan correlates with physical scanning.
• Propositional approach to imagery: Imagery is represented as language-like codes, not sensory-like images.
• Perky's study on imagery: Participants' mental images are influenced by real images, suggesting imagery and perception share neural mechanisms
• Imagery neurons: Respond to both perceiving and imagining objects.
• Ganis et al: Perception activates the same brain areas, suggesting that imagery and perception share neural resources.