Engelse samenvatting van 3.6. Neuropsychology aan de Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. Een uitgebreide samenvatting van de boekhoofdstukken 22 en 16 van Kolb en de artikelen Ziino et al. (2006), Michel et al. (2006), McDonald et al. (2002), en Wright et al. (2012).
- Attention is a property of the nervous system that directs complex actions of the body and
brain.
- They are not epiphenomena, properties that emerge simply because the brain is complex.
Defining attention
- Simple animals have limited sensory capacity and equally limited behavioral repertoire, and
primates (including humans) have even further developed sensory capacity and behavioral
complexity.
- And so, if sensory and motor capacities increase, so does the problem of selection of
information and behavior.
- We also need to combine all this sensory information into one whole (binding
problem).
- One proposed process for selective awareness and response to stimuli is attention,
narrowing of focusing awareness selectively to a part of the sensory environment or to a
class of stimuli.
- This process, the mental spotlight, may be conscious or unconscious.
- As sensorimotor capacities expand, so does the process of attention.
- Attention is primarily a top-down process that selects information from a specific part of the
sensory world.
Attention
- Attention has an uneven history, with behaviorists thinking that it is not a thing, and the
cognitive neuroscience that attention exists.
2
, 3.6. Neuropsychology
Automatic and conscious processing compared
- Some behaviors can be done with little focused attention, whereas other behaviors are
highly sensitive to the allocation of attention.
- Automatic and conscious processing require at least some different cortical circuits, with
attentive processing including processes of consciousness.
Automatic processes
- Unconscious, direct behavior occurs without intention, involuntarily, without awareness,
and without interfering with ongoing activities, bottom-up.
- Bottom-up processing is data driven, it relies almost exclusively on the stimulus information
in the environment.
Conscious operations
- Controlled, effortful, attentive, and conscious, top-down.
- Top-down processing is conceptually driven, relying on information already in memory.
- Experiment of Treisman (1986): Visual processing task; Identifying a
target with an extra line is relatively easy and search time is
independent of the number of distractors, but when identifying a
target without the extra line, the time finding the target is dependent
on the number of distractors.
- From this, we can infer:
- Certain aspects of visual processing are automatic, we do not
need to focus attention, analysis only requires a specific visual
feature to locate the target.
- Other aspects of visual processing depend on focused
attention to locate the conjunction (combination of features);
conjunction search is a serial process searching for
combinations of sensory information.
- Although we can practice speeding up the feature processing,
it remains dependent on specific automatic neural associations
between features as well as serial-processing pathways.
- Treisman explained her results with the perceptual model of feature search, the cognitive
strategy for scanning for specific features of stimuli.
- Stimulus registered in area V1 is broken down into separate feature maps, this
information is then serially processed in parallel pathways, e.g. area V3, V4, or V5.
- Attention is directed to each location in turn and that features present in the same
fixation of attention are combined to form a single object.
- Attention is a glue that cements features into one single object.
- When the features have been assembled, the object can be perceived and held in
memory as a unit.
- Neurons outside area V1 and V2 respond differentially, depending on whether
attention is focused on the corresponding receptive field.
- Features are the properties the visual system codes cells to detect, maybe biologically
significant stimuli.
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