English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Book Chapter

Brain potential analysis of selective attention

MPS-Authors
There are no MPG-Authors in the publication available
External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Wijers, A. A., Mulder, G., Gunter, T. C., & Smid, H. G. O. M. (1996). Brain potential analysis of selective attention. In O. Neumann, & A. F. Sanders (Eds.), Handbook of Perception and Action (pp. 333-387). London: Academic Press. doi:10.1016/S1874-5822(96)80026-0.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0003-3FB3-D
Abstract
Selective attention can be investigated by studying performance in simple tasks as a function of the manipulations of task variables. This chapter provides an overview of the research in which selective attention is investigated with the aid of event-related potentials of the brain (ERPs). Selectivity prevents the organism from responding reflexively to its environment: it enables flexibility of behavior. By combining mental chronometry with ERP analysis, an attempt is made to identify particular ERP components as reliable and valid markers of specific aspects or stages of information processing. ERPs can clarify the timing, ordering, and interactions of the intermediate processes that are engaged in specific cognitive activities. ERP research has made it convincingly clear that selective attention may act upon the early stages of information processing. The onset latencies of ERP effects can be quite early under the proper conditions. Results from multi-feature selection tasks show that mostly individual features are selected before the combinations of features. Although ERPs indicate that information processing is modulated by selective attention at early stages, such effects do not necessarily indicate that the processing of irrelevant information is terminated.