ATTENTION

Teofilo O. Palsimon Jr. MPsy, RPm, ICAP II

Attention can be defined as a concentration of mental activity that
allows you to take in a limited portion of the vast stream of
information available from both your sensory world and your
memory

Attention decides what’s important and when it is important

What does it mean to be relevant?
How does the brain evaluate what’s
relevant and what is not?  
In selective attention,  we attend to
some stimuli and ignore others
We often think that attention is all
2 ways to direct attention:
about what we are focusing on, but
it’s also about what information our + Overt attention – Orienting the body and
brain is trying to filter out.  sense organs toward a stimulus
+ Covert attention – Guiding attention without
any external cues that you are doing so
Voluntary vs Reflexive
Attention
Voluntary vs Reflexive Attention
+ Voluntary or endogenous attention
• Top-down process
• Guided by our goals, expectations, and
rewards
+ Reflexive or exogenous attention
• Bottom-up process
• Driven by sensory stimuli that involuntary
capture our attention
Balancing + The two attention systems are in opposition
to one another 

Attention  + We are either working toward our momentary

goals or orienting to stimuli that distract us
from those goals
+ Allows us to not be too focused that we miss
danger and not too scatterbrained that we
never accomplish anything
Cocktail Party Effect
+ In loud environments there are multiple auditory
signals that can be attended to
+ We have the ability to selectively attend to any one
auditory stream at a given time
 +Only a limited amount of information can
be perceived at any given time
+Do these bottlenecks occur early in the
sensory processing stream or late in the
Bottlenecks perception forming phase?
+Does the brain process all sensory
information and then choose, or does it
limit the options before the processing
occur?
Anatomy of
Attention
+ Multiple areas involved in the control of
attention both cortical and subcortical 
+ Cortical
+ Superior frontal cortex,
posterior parietal cortex,
posterior superior temporal
cortex, and anterior cingulate
cortex
+ Subcortical
+ Superior colliculus in midbrain
and pulvinar nucleus of the
thalamus
Stimulus Evoked EEG
Response
+ When a stimulus is shown to a subject while
recording EEG, the following occurs at the
elctrodes near the occipital lobe
+ Big positive ERP wave starts at 60-70ms and
peaks at ~100ms
+ P1 wave
+ Followed by a negative wave that peaks at
~180ms
+ N1 wave
Attention's Effect on ERPs

+ Attention modulates the amplitude of the

sensory-evoked ERPs beginning with the
P1 wave 
+ P1 is larger for attended stimuli
when stimulus in the same location
and not attended to
+ Same is true for auditory and tactile
attention
+ P1 wave is a sensory evoked signal
+ This supports early selection models
Evidence from fMRI
+ Used a cueing task where there
was an arrow and then 8 seconds
later there were flickering black
and white checker presented 
+ Subjects made a response if they
saw any grey targets on the cued
side
+ Results showed greater activation
in the contralateral visual cortex
from where the attention was
directed
Evidence from fMRI
+ When multiple stimuli were presented
simultaneously without attentional demands, the
simuli competed with one another
+ The neural response was reduced compared
to when one stimulus was presented alone
+ Attention was directed to one stimulus while all
were shown together
+ The reduced responses were not present,
and the response was as if there were only
one stimulus
+ Effect was largest in V4
+ Late processing and large receptive fields
Inhibition of Return
+ Our automatic orienting system has built-in
mechanisms to prevent reflexively directed
attention from getting stuck at a location for
more than a couple hundred milliseconds
+ Occurs after 300 milliseconds
+ After a reflexive orientation to a location in
space, return of attention to that location is
inhibited
+ Subjects respond slower to stimuli that
are presented in a region of space
where a distractor had been present
previously
Visual Search
+ Gaze is biased towards new locations and
rarely returns to areas that have already
been searched
+ Items are easier to identify if they have
salient features
+ Reaction time remains quick despite adding
new distractors
+ Much harder when target shares features
with distractors
+ Reaction time increases as more distractors
are added
+ Spatial attention required to separate features
of the target from the distractor features
Failures in Attention
Inattentional Blindness and Change
Blindness
Inattentional Blindness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDISZ7zT8YQ
Change Blindness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkEMkgVI3y4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FoghxotdYU
Flicker Paradigm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh_9XFzbWV8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWSxSQsspiQ&t=27s
 + Chronic condition marked by persistent
inattention, hyperactivity, and sometimes
impulsivity

Attention Deficit + ADHD may be linked to white matter

differences in attention networks
Hyperactivity + Studies show decreased white matter
throughout the brain especially

Disorder (ADHD) pronounced in the prefrontal cortex

+ Low norepinephrine and dopamine
activity
+ Low bloodflow in the prefronal cortex
 + The complete lack of attention to one side of
the body and visual field
+ Only notices you on the side, combs
hair on one side, eat from one side, read
Unilateral Neglect only on one side
+ Usually due to a stroke that effects the
attention network in one hemisphere
+ Patients have no awareness of the deficit
Eye Movements, Executive Functions, and
Unilateral Neglect
+ Eye movements are
biased to the side
unaffected by the stroke
+ Those without neglect
search the entire visual
field
+ Clock test 
+ Patients draw half of the
clock