| External attention | Deals primarily with desensory events external to the body |
| Internal attention | Deals primarily with our internally generated thoughts, desires and motivations. |
| Agency | Ability of an entity to independently act upon the world to create change in order to achieve goals. |
| Attention system | A framework fo the human brain containing three different systems for alerting, orienting and the executive function. |
| Brainstem | The region in the posterior part of the braint hat serves to connect the cortex to the spinal cord, its functions include basic physiological processes, as well as the communication of sensory and motor information between brain and body |
| Top-down | Conceptually driven processes reflect the influence of higher-order cognitive processes such as thoughts, beliefs, and expectations |
| Frontal eye field | Found in the frontal cortex and involved with the generation and control of eye movements. |
| Bottom-up | Stimulus, driven processing of incoming sensory information that produces increasingly elaborate and meaningful representations of the input |
| Dedault mode network (DFN) | A network of brain regions that is active when a person is not focused on the external environment. |
| Cocktail party problem | Descrives how we successfully focus on one speaker in a background of noise and other conversations |
| Early selection | When the filter for attention occur early in the stream of information processing |
| Late selection | When the filter for attention occurs late in the stream of information processing. Thus the filter elimiantes some informations that has already been processed. |
| Central processing unit (CPU) | In computing, the central processing unit in the part of a compuates that controls operations and executes commands. |
| Spotlight | The metaphor of attention where we can think of attention as a spotlight that illuminates locations of interest |
| Dual-task paradigm | Arises when one measures performance on two tasks independently and togheter. If performance when performed independently and together is equal, then the two tasks do not compete for resources |
| Preattentive visual processing | Can simultaneously analyse the entire scene and detect the presence of unique features |
| Binding problem | Describes the issue that although perception works via analysis of separate perceptual features our subjective experience has all these features bound together. |
| Heuristic | A problem solving method that oftens finds a low effort solution but is not guaranteed to solve. |
| Perceptual learning | A type of learning that occurs at low level of processing and includes the development of enhances sensory processing abilities. |
| Distributed attention | Is reminiscent of preattentive vision and allows rapid statistical analysis of the entire scene. |
| Feedforward | Feedforward processing secribers a bottom-up process where lower levels of a network progressively stimulate higher levels of the network. |
| Recurrent processing | Within a network, involves computations that occur in cyclical fashion |
| Receptive field | The receptive field of a neutron indicates the physical space that stimulates the neuron. In vision, it is the region of the visual field to which that neuron is sensitive if stimulated with light. |
| Change blindness | The phenomenon where substantial differences between two nearly identical scenes are not noticed when presented sequentially. |
| Inattentional blindness | The failure to notice a clearly visible target due to attention being diverted from the target. |
| Afterimage | Occurs when vision of an objects remain after presentation has ceased for example, after staring at a bright light |
| Continuity editing | A film-making technique to produce a smooth continuous experience across changes in camera shot. |
