Deck 14: Attention and Awareness

Question 1

According to Petersen and Posner's definition, which of the following is not included in the orienting network

A) Pulvinar
B) Cerebellum
C) Superior colliculus
D) Parietal cortex

Answer 1

B

Question 2

Which of these terms has not been used to describe active attention?

A) Endogenous
B) Sustained
C) Voluntary
D) Transient

Answer 2

D

Question 3

Mueller and Rabbitt found that the optimal cue-target interval for exogenous attention was:

A) About 130 ms
B) 300 ms or more
C) 20 ms
D) 200 ms

Answer 3

A

Question 4

Liu et al. found that:

A) Attentional selection by feature is faster than selection by location
B) Selection by feature inhibits selection by location
C) Selection by location and selection by feature are equally fast
D) Selection by location is faster than selection by feature

Question 5

Lavie suggested that:

A) All items in an array receive perceptual processing
B) Only target items are processed
C) How many items are processed depends on perceptual load
D) The bottleneck in perception is in transfer of items to memory

Question 6

Studies of attention have suggested a 'Mexican hat' neural response profile that applies not just to spatial location but also to feature space. This suggests:

A) an inhibitory centre and inhibitory surround
B) an excitatory centre and excitatory surround
C) an excitatory centre and inhibitory surround
D) an inhibitory centre and excitatory surround

Question 7

Using a transparent motion display in which two dot patterns moved in opposite directions, Lankheet and Verstraten found that:

A) Attention to one direction produced subsequent motion aftereffects in the other direction
B) Attention to one direction produced subsequent motion aftereffects in the same direction
C) Attention to one direction raised contrast thresholds for faint patterns moving in that direction
D) Had no effect on subsequent motion perception

Question 8

Georgiades and Harris found that diverting attention during adaptation to moving stripes:

A) Reduced the apparent change of size of subsequently viewed stripes
B) Reduced the velocity of subsequent motion aftereffects
C) Had no effect on subsequent aftereffects
D) Increased the duration of subsequent motion aftereffects

Question 9

Spitzer et al. found that during a more difficult discrimination task:

A) A neuron's response to its preferred orientation rose, but its bandwidth fell
B) A neuron's response to its preferred orientation rose, but its bandwidth also rose
C) A neuron's bandwidth fell but its orientation sensitivity was unaffected
D) Both the neuron's orientation sensitivity and its bandwidth fell

Question 10

Experiments with humans that have manipulated the attentional field size via use of small or large (relative to target size) exogenous pre-cues have observed:

A) performance shifts in the direction of response gain when attentional fields were small and when attentional fields were large
B) performance shifts in the direction of contrast gain when attentional fields were small and in the direction of response gain when attentional fields were large
C) performance shifts in the direction of response gain when attentional fields were small and in the direction of contrast gain when attentional fields were large
D) performance shifts in the direction of contrast gain when attentional fields were small and when attentional fields were large

Question 11

Using fMRI, Saproo and Serences (2014) showed that:

A) Attending to a direction in one part of the visual field has no effect on activity in regions responding to other parts of the visual field
B) Attending to a direction in one part of the visual field enhances responses in regions throughout the visual field
C) Attending to a direction in one part of the visual field can enhance the response to that direction and decrease the response to the opposite direction elsewhere in the visual field
D) None of these

Question 12

In the studies of Long and Moran on the effects of viewing an unambiguous figure:

A) Viewing time was irrelevant to the perception of subsequently viewed ambiguous versions of the figure
B) After long viewing periods, the percept of the ambiguous figure was the same as that of the previously viewed unambiguous figure
C) After long viewing periods, the percept of the ambiguous figure was the opposite to that of the previously viewed unambiguous figure
D) After short viewing periods, the percept of the ambiguous figure was the opposite to that of the previously viewed unambiguous figure

Question 13

Rock et al. showed that when participants are unaware of the possibility of a change in the perception of ambiguous figures:

A) Changes in perception are rare or do not occur
B) Frequency of changes in perception is similar to when participants are aware
C) Frequency of changes in perception is higher than when participants are aware
D) More changes of fixation occur

Question 14

Applying TMS over the posterior intra-parietal sulcus:

A) eliminates perceptual switching of ambiguous stimuli
B) slows perceptual switching of ambiguous stimuli
C) speeds up perceptual switching of ambiguous stimuli
D) has no effect on perceptual switching of ambiguous stimuli

Question 15

In Type 1 Blindsight:

A) Patients cannot make any discriminations and say that they are unaware of the stimuli
B) Patients can make some discriminations but say that they are unaware of the stimuli
C) Patients can make some discriminations and say that they have some awareness of the stimuli
D) Patients cannot make any discriminations but say that they have some awareness of the stimuli

Question 16

Azzopardi and Cowey showed that patients with blindsight:

A) Could discriminate 0% and 100% coherently moving dot patterns
B) Could discriminate the direction of motion of gratings
C) Could discriminate the direction of motion of single bars
D) Could not discriminate between stationary and moving gratings

Question 17

Which of the following was not suggested by Campion et al. as an explanation for blindsight?

A) Residual islands of functioning cortex
B) Scattered light within the eye
C) Response bias
D) Activation of the pupil

Question 18

Moradi et al. showed that face identity aftereffects from monocular viewing:

A) Were reduced or abolished if a field of moving dots was simultaneously viewed by the other eye
B) Were reduced compared to those from binocular viewing
C) Were unaffected by a field of moving dots simultaneously viewed by the other eye
D) Were very similar to those from binocular viewing

Question 19

Blake et al. showed that a high contrast grating shown to one eye produced a similar amount of adaptation, whether or not the grating was suppressed from awareness by an orthogonal grating presented to the other eye. When they replaced the high contrast adapting grating with a low contrast grating, they found:

A) A similar result
B) Less adaptation in the suppressed condition
C) That the orthogonal grating had a reduced effect
D) More adaptation in the suppressed condition

Question 20

Maruya et al. used Continuous Flash Suppression in the other eye to prevent perception of a monocularly presented moving adapting stimulus and compared the resulting aftereffects to those obtained without monocular suppression adaptation. They found:

A) Aftereffects from the adapted eye even with monocular suppression
B) No aftereffects from the adapted eye with monocular suppression
C) Aftereffects from the unadapted eye with monocular suppression, but only on static test fields
D) No aftereffects from the unadapted eye with monocular suppression

Question 21

Mueller and Rabbitt found that:

A) Endogenous attention could be interrupted by an exogenous cue
B) Endogenous attention was immune to external interruptions
C) Exogenous attention could be interrupted by an endogenous attention
D) None of these

Question 22

Goddard et al.'s MEG study found that:

A) effects of spatial attention emerged before those of feature-selective attention
B) effects of feature-selective attention emerged before those of spatial attention
C) effects of spatial attention and feature-selective attention emerged at the same time
D) effects of spatial attention and feature-selective attention emerged only after the onset of feedback from frontal regions

Question 23

Lavie and Fox showed that:

A) Negative priming was unaffected by the number of distractors
B) Negative priming was reduced when the number of distractors in the array was large
C) Positive priming was unaffected by the number of distractors
D) Positive priming was enhanced when the number of distractors in the array was large

Question 24

Which of the following was not suggested by Carrasco as a process by which attention could affect perception?

A) Signal enhancement
B) Internal noise reduction
C) Signal phase shifting
D) External noise reduction

Question 25

The feature similarity gain model of Martinez Trujillo and Treue suggests that:

A) Attentional effects are confined to neurons which process similar features
B) The only effect of attention is to increase the gain of neurons which process similar features
C) Attention increases the gain of neurons which process a particular value of a feature and decreases the gain in neurons which process different values of that feature
D) None of these

Question 26

Attention-driven enhanced neural responding in contrast detection tasks typically suggest increases as a function of:

A) Response gain in electrophysiological (EEG) studies and contrast gain in brain imaging (fMRI) studies
B) Additive gain in electrophysiological (EEG) studies and response gain in brain imaging (fMRI) studies
C) Contrast gain in electrophysiological (EEG) studies and response gain in brain imaging (fMRI) studies
D) Response gain in electrophysiological (EEG) studies and additive gain in brain imaging (fMRI) studies

Question 27

Weiskrantz et al. showed that Patient DB (for whom part of V1 in the right hemisphere had been removed) could do which of the following to stimuli presented in the 'blind' region of the visual field:

A) Recognise familiar faces
B) Discriminate X from O at better than chance level
C) Discriminate small orientation differences of tiny lines
D) Discriminate the direction of motion of moving plaids

Question 28

Fox and Blake showed that after monocular adaptation to high contrast stimuli:

A) Aftereffects were similar whether or not the other eye viewed a different high contrast stimulus
B) An aftereffect could not be obtained from the unadapted eye
C) Aftereffects were as strong as with binocular adaptation
D) Aftereffects were stronger than with low contrast adapting stimuli

Question 29

How do exogenous and endogenous attention differ?

Question 30

Do we attend to a location or to a feature?

Question 31

Describe the feature similarity gain model, and evidence from humans which supports it.

Question 32

What neural structures have most commonly been associated with blindsight?

Question 33

What have studies with binocular rivalry revealed about the sites of visual adaptation?