PSYB51H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Joint Attention, Spatial Frequency, Language Processing In The Brain
Document Summary
Selective attention: cognitive brain mechanism that enables one to process relevant inputs, thoughts, or actions while ignoring others that are less important, irrelevant, or distracting. Arousal: a global state of the brain reflecting an overall level of responsiveness. Bottlenecks cannot perceive everything in our environment which is why we need attention. Overt shifts of attention but not covert shifts of attention. Cueing as a tool for examining attention. Simple probe detection experiment: measures rt (or perceptual thresholds) Participant press response key when they see/hear the stimuli. Auditory stimuli result to 30ms faster rt (than visual stimuli) Posner: added a cue to the simple probe detection experiment. After a certain delay, an outline of square appears (flashes) Then, the target (dot) appears; participant needs to react to the target not the square. If on the same side of later target; valid cue: cue correctly predicts where the target appears faster rt.
