| What does implementing a blank screen between changing images do? | Implements motion transients for every part of the image, not just the changing parts, therefore they don't guide attention to the change. |
| What is attention? | The ability to preferentially process some parts of a stimulus at the expense of processing of other parts of the stimulus. |
| Why is attention needed? | Perceptual system has a limited capacity - can't process everything in the visual scene simultaneously.
Avoids us becoming overwhelmed. |
| What is overt attention? | Directly looking at an object. |
| What is covert attention? | Looking at one object but attending to another object. |
| What are saccades? | Ballistic (very fast) eye movements between fixations (on different objects). |
| What are fixations? | When the eyes stay looking directly at one part of a scene, can be rests between saccades. |
| What are fixations determined by? | Personal goals and expectations. |
| What are the two processes of directing our attention? | Initial involuntary process (mediated by attentional capture).
Subsequent voluntary process (guided by your goals and expectations). |
| What is attentional capture? | When your fixations are initially captured by salient parts of the scene. Involuntary action. |
| How do expectations determine your fixations? | If an object is unexpected, you will fixate on it for longer and fixate it more often (e.g. semantically inconsistent or syntactically inconsistent). |
| What is a semantically inconsistent object? | One that does not fit the global identity of a scene. |
| What is a syntactically inconsistent object? | One that is in a physically impossible location. |
| What are the effects of attention? | Speeds responses.
Influence appearance/Makes perception more vivid.
Influence physiological responding. |
| What did Carrasco et al.'s (2004) study find? | Attention can make objects appear to have a higher contrast. |
| What is the binding problem? | The issue of how an object's individual features are combined (i.e. bound) to create a coherent percept. |
| What is the feature integration theory (FIT)? | The theory that the binding problem is solved by attending to only one location at a time.
Only features associated with that location are processes, so only those features are bound together.
Avoids binding features from different objects. |
| What are illusory conjuctions? | When an attribute is associated with the wrong object (incorrect bindings). More likely to occur when attention is inhibited or when attention cannot be focused on a single object (e.g. due to parietal lobe damage). |
| What is a conjunction search? | Searching for a specific combination of two stimulus features.
Require binding problem.
Slower. |
| What is a feature search? | When the target contains a feature (e.g. certain colour) that the distractors do not contain.
Does not require solving of the binding problem, therefore occurs faster as attention does not need to be applied to eat item in turn. |
| What type of search is this an example of? | Feature search. |
| What is change blindness? | When you only remember/focus on certain parts of a scene and therefore won't notice changes in the other parts of a scene. |
| Why doesn't change blindness occur all the time? | Because changes usually generate motion transient that draw attention to the location change, thereby making it easy to spot the change. |
| What does implementing a blank screen between changing images do? | Implements motion transients for every part of the image, not just the changing parts, therefore they don't guide attention to the change. |
