What is Attention?

Does attention have limits?

Properties of attention

Issues in understanding attention

1) Can you attend to all sensory/ perceptual mental activity?

2) How much can you take in?

3) What factors determine what draw your attention?
4) What factors determine what holds your attention?

5) What happens to information that is not attended to?

Types of attentional mechanisms

Attention Pathways

Divided attention

Selective attention

Dichotic listening

What is noticed from the unattended channel?

Important properties of attention shown by dichotic listening tasks

Principles of divided attention

The Stroop effect

Automaticity

Bottleneck theories

Schneider & Shiffrin's Model

Early versus late selection models

Visual search tasks

The isolated-feature/ combined-feature effect

The feature-present/ feature-absent effect

Treisman's feature integration theory

Traditional oddball task (presenting squares frequently, and then adding a circle infrequently)

Novelty oddball task (same as traditional one but adding new infrequent pictures of common scenes)

Emotional oddball task (negative emotional pictures are added in with the neutral ones)

Helmholtz and covert attention

Naturalistic orienting

Cues used to direct spatial attention

A network of regions in posterior parietal, frontal, and cingulate cortices responsible for domain-independent attentional manipulations

Inhibition of Return (IOR)

Attentional bias to threat

Types of threat

Differential attention to stimulus features

Attention differs from fusiform face area (FF and the parahippocampal place area(PPA)

Cortical regions involved in attentional control

Sources and sites of attention

Brain regions involved in detection of novelty and attentional reorienting

Sub-cortical areas of attention

Spatial neglect

Neuropsychological tests of attention: the cancellation task

Neuropsychological tests of attention: Gaze bias

Neuropsychological tests of attention: Test of extinction

Bálint's syndrome

Simultaneous agnosia

Oculomotor apraxia

Optic ataxia

Blindsight