(06/08) Dec 1 & 15, 2014, Attention I/II (st)

Topics addressed in the lecture:

• What is attention?
• Distinguishing attention from arousal
• Demonstrations of perceptual effects of attention
• Quantitative studies of attention
• Diseases of attention
• Neural basis of attention

Examples for question you should be able to answer:

• Describe the Cocktail-Party-Effekt in attention research
• Desribe the dependency of reaction times on the number of distractors in parallel and in serial visual search experiments.
• Which region of the brain is typically lesioned in patients with the neglect syndrome?
• What is meant by 'multiplicative modulation' in the context of attentional effects on cortical information processing?

Important concepts:

• attention vs. arousal
• central bottleneck
• dichotic listening experiments
• visual search experimental paradigm, simple vs. conjunctive search
• Posner experimental paradigm
• Neglect syndrome

Slides