Perception and attention 13/12/17
How does attention affect our ability to perceive?
Perception can be affected by lack of focuses attention
• Change blindness
• Observers were shown a picture with and without a missing element in an
alternating fasion with a blank screen.
•Results showed that the pictures had to alternate a number of times before
the change was detected.
• When a cue is added to show where to attend, observers noticed change
more quickly.
“How does attention affect our ability to perceive?” – We can perceive some things,
such as the gender of a face, without focused attention, but that focused attention is
necessary for detecting many of the details within a scene and for detecting the details
of specific objects in the scene.
Does attention enhance perception?
Effects of attention on information processing
Attention and experiencing a coherent world
Feature Integration Therory:
Illusory conjunctions – continued
•Results showed that:
• Incorrect associations of features with objects occurred 18% of the time.
• Asking observers to focus on the target objects eliminated this effect.
• Balint’s syndrome
(complete)
Visual search
• Conjunction search - finding target with two or more features
• Patients with parietal love damage cannot perform conjunction searches well
compared to people without such damage.
• Parietal lobe is the destination for the where stream.