What is attention? what types of attention are there?? How is it they’re achieved?

Attention is: To ’ to focus on things

There is selective attention, covert attention and overt attention

Selective Attention  is the Tuning into one thing in the environment and the exclusion of others 

the fovea,and cortical magnification help this process

Overt attention involves looking directly at objects

Covert attention is attention without moving the eyes

What all is involved in the initial scanning process? What shows their relation?

Saccades, fixation, salience and attention

Saccades are small quick eye movements used to scan a visual scene.

Pauses between saccades are fixations. Used to gather info

Salience: areas of an image that stand out because they have high contrast, or color or orientations.

 task demands will override saliency in guiding fixations.

Saliency maps show fixations are related to such properties in the initial scanning process

Define scene-scheme, what study was used to demonstrate its effect?

scene schema.  Observer’s knowledge about the type of scene can influence the order of fixations

Shinoda’s study found that  Observers noticed stop signs more when they were at intersections The effects of experience and expectation on attention are top-down influences,

 While salience can be considered a bottom-up influence.          

Posner’s experiment on what showed information processing is most efficient where attention is directed?

spatial attention

 spatial attention is Attention to specific locations is called

Fixation experiment  had  Observers looked at a fixation point.

Pre-cueing with an arrow indicated on which side a stimulus was likely to appear

What is inattentional blindness and what phenomenon is it closely related to?

Inattentional blindness occurs when a stimulus is not perceived even when the person is looking directly at it

Change blindness if important information that draws your attention to changes in a scene is missing, it is very difficult to see the change. 

Simons and Chabris gorilla experiment demonstrated change blindness

Li 'sinitial perception experiment and Reddy’s follow-up experiment showed what?

Perception is possible  without attention. 

attention is necessary if we want more than the ‘gist’ of a scene. 

In Li’s image would be flashed for 27ms were then to perform either a central peripheral or dual task

experiment by Reddy observers could identify the gender of faces presented for only 150ms. 

Who developed the  Load theory of perception? How was it devised? What does it state?

Foster and Lavie

Devised well studying task-irrelevant stimuli

Task-irrelevant stimuli are stimuli that do not provide information relevant to the task

States there is a perceptual capacity and load that plays a role in attention

What Feature integration? What is it used to solve what problem? (According to Treisman and Gelade)

Feature integration theory (FIT) argues that attention has a major role in solving the binding problem

there is a pre-attentive stage of processing in which the features are separate

attention binds the information from the what/where pathways to create uniform percepts. 

The binding problem

binding problem is caused from the fact that we have to group very different sources of information

What supporting evidence has been found for FIT?

illusory conjunctions.

Illusory conjunctions  are features associated with one object that are incorrectly associated with another. 

When viewing multiple stimuli If not asked to specifically attend to a task or objective the attributes of stimuli are unbound and can be assigned to the wrong shape

what syndrome is caused by damage to the parietal lobe?

Balint’s syndrome

Inability to focus on objects individually

What are attention maps?

Attention maps show directing attention to a specific area of space activates a specific area of the brain.

are receptive fields malluable?

Receptive fields are malleable depending on a change or shift in attention

Define Binding

binding. is grouping  pieces of an object or scene together