Attention is selective. Selective attention refers to the allocation of processing resources, generally at the expense of resources allocated to other stimuli.
Neuroscientific concept: attention is the manipulation of activity of population of cells that process sensory information.
Advantages of attention:
- Detailed representation of stimuli
- Faster and more accurate response to stimuli
- Better memory of stimuli, better decision-making, etc.
Disadvantage: opposite effect for unattended stimuli.
Arousal is not attention. Arousal modulates all sensory signals baseline effect
Attention selects and modulates specific sensory signals selection effect
Two forms of attention:
- Overt attention: you look at what you want to attend
- Covert attention: you attend something that is outside your gaze
Internal manipulation of attention: you decide yourself what you attend. This is endogenous, top-down or controlled attention.
External manipulation of attention: sensory stimulus characteristics decide what you attend. This exogenous, bottom-up, reflexive attention. The sensory area is shaped by experience over years. It responses to most relevant things due to experience.
--> Salience models: models that predict what you attend automatically.
Attentional blindness
- You cannot process everything at the same time: loss of information.
- Can be measured using the change blindness paradigm
Attentional blink
- Try to detect the white target
- As you are busy with target 1, target 2 is missed
Attentional cueing
- Posner’s cueing task
- Recognition of target is better and faster for congruent cue, and worse for the incongruent cue
- Same applies to exogenous cue
Cocktail party
- People prefer one auditory stream of information over another
- Ignoring one stream is called shadowing
Visual search
- Quickly finding an item in a clustered environment
Neural mechanisms are strengthened when attention is given to it.
Question 1 can be answered using EEG: great temporal resolution.
- Also auditory attention: compare ERP to attended vs. unattended stimuli
- BER is unaffected by attention
- P20-50 and N1 are evoked by attention
Attention is necessary for similarity analysis.
Mismatch negativity (MMN): oddball paradigm.
Feature attention: the amplitude is increased for attended stimuli and the sensitivity is narrowed.
--> Attention acts in the brain area that codes the target feature.
- Orientation: V1
- Color in V4
- Motion in MT+
- Faces in FFA
- Pitch/frequency in auditory cortex
Spatial attention: attention to location in a visual field. Could be an auditory source.
Receptive field: area of interest to the neuron. A neuron responds when a stimulus is shown in its receptive field.
Each cell has a receptive field: responses only to a specific area in the visual field.
Object attention: also known as object-based attention.
Object or spatial attention is guided by features.
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