Attention

Single-cell studies

Single-cell studies measure the activity in a single neuron, or group of neurons.
If attention facilitaties processing for attended stimuli, then you should find more activity when a stimulus is attended.
If attention precents processing for unattended stimuli, then you should find less activity when a stimulus is ignored.
Moran & Desiome (1985) cells are equally active during no attention and baseline.

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Various neuroimaging techniques (e.g PET, fMRI) have been used to test which neural mechanisms are involved in attention
Areas that are generally found to be involved in attention: parietal cortex and frontal cortex.
Corbetta & Shulman (2002): there are separate goal-directed and stimulus driven system. Neglect patients have damage to the stimulus-driven system. The two attentional systems generally function together and interact with each other.
The neuroimaging techniques show that attention enhances the processing of attended stimuli. Attention also suppresses processing of ignored stimuli.

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Negative priming: is an implicit memory effect in which prior exposure to a stimulus unfavourably influences the response to the same stimulus. It falls under the category of priming, which refers to the change in the response towards a stimulus due to a subconscious memory effect. Negative priming describes the slow and error-prone reaction to a stimulus that is previously ignored. Negative priming is highly related to the selective nature of attention and memory.
Inhibition of return: in visual search, it is more difficult to detect a target in a location that has been inspected already, compared to a location that was not previously attended. It seems that the system is reluctant to re-visit previously attended locations, which facilitates efficient search.
Negative priming and inhibition of return show that there may be a suppressive component in attention which dampens the processing of certain information. Together with the increase in activation for attended information, the net result of such a mechanism is that currently attended information 'stands out' more, and has a processing advantage over unattended information

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