In our daily lives, we often have to pay attention to a multitude of things at once. This is called divided attention. For example, when driving, you need to pay attention to the other cars around you, traffic signs, in-car distractions such as phone, radio or passengers, all while occasionally glancing up at the rearview mirror. The problem is, there are limits to our ability to divide our attention. For example, sending and reading emails while driving would more than likely end in a disaster.
While we do use this divided attention frequently, there is another very important form of attention called selective attention in which we focus on specific objects ignoring other stimuli. While both are equally important in their respective purposes, they can often hinder us if used in the wrong situation. As mentioned above, driving using selective attention often ends poorly. This is why rubbernecking a crash on the highway can lead to another. We focus so heavily one thing we lose mental and visual sight of other objects around us. Similarly, trying to use divided attention to complete a task that requires focus and detail such as painting would also end
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Does perception require focused attention? Leila Reddy and her team revealed that we are able to perceive information from a quickly presented photograph of a face or item that is located off to the side from the attended stimulus. In her study, participants were instructed to focus on the + sign and then an array of letters, sometimes all the same and sometimes different, all centered in the screen. Immediately after the letters were shown, a face or multi colored disc would shown in the peripheral (not the attended stimuli of the letters in the center). The three conditions of the experiment were central task condition, peripheral task condition, and dual task condition (Goldstein, 2007, p.
A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
William James, an American psychologist, proposed the first theory of what we now call “selective attention”. Selective attention is the assumption that in order to focus on one activity going on in your environment, you must hinder all other tasks occurring in the background. A good illustration of this would be to block out the music playing for the sake of progress on school work. This is referred to as the spotlight theory. In premise, your visual attention works like a spotlight. There is a focal point, or place or concentration. Beyond the focal point is considered to be fringe; seen by the viewer, but not observed clearly. Outside of the focal point and fringe is surplus and not viewed at all (Cherry, 2014).
When we are doing a certain task we may get a text or we have to check our social media because of our addiction to it. These things cause us to drift off from what we actually are focused on. Sometimes we may be doing something, like reading, and our mind will subconsciously drift off onto another topic, like what our plans are for tomorrow. Some people do believe though that if the two tasks you are doing use different sections of the brain that it is all right to multitask. The example Restak gave of this was “an example of the principle of cerebral geography: The brain works at it’s best with the activation of different, rather than identical, brain areas. That’s why doodling while talking on the telephone isn’t a problem for most people, since speaking and drawing use different brain areas. But writing a thank you note while on the phone results in mental strain because speaking and writing share some of the same brain circuitry” (Restak 422). While this may be true, we still are not dedicating all of our time to just one specific task we are working
Processing capacity is a very broad and flexible category according to many researchers. In fact, the quote above mentioned suggests that we often fail to notice things that happen just in front of us (unexpected events that are often salient) either because we were completely absorbed by something else or because we had so many things to do at the same time that we couldn’t pay attention to it. We have all at least once failed to see a friend who was waving at us while eating in the cafeteria or walking in a crowded street. The primary question that we should ask ourselves is: how many things can we attend at the same time? The truth is that we didn’t perceive this friend because of a phenomenon called “inattentional blindness”. The problem is that the richness of our visual experience leads us to believe that our visual representation will include and preserve the same amount of detail (Levin et al 2000). In this paper we’ll see the different theories of inattentional blindness, and the classical theories demonstrating this paradigm.
In this documentary we get to discover the differences between our conscious and unconscious brain. This video provides us with useful information on how and why our brains act in the way they do using multiple tests to prove each point. Our brains are made of parts, like a car, and they all are needed in order to function properly. The video names the parts and the functions of each throughout the video. They use a magician’s tricks throughout the documentary to show how our brains suppress what is not in our “spotlight” attention proving that our brain can only focus on one thing at a time. If we compare this to our textbook, it says that this is called selective attention. The marshmallow test, showed in the video, helps us understand how
Distracted driving refers to a wide range of conditions involving the driver of the vehicle not being alert and attentive to the task of driving. These distractions can mean anything from texting and making phone calls to eating and other activities. Driving a motor vehicle while simultaneously being engaged in a different task can and is a fatal mistake that
Performing well in at certain tasks and retaining information both require a high level of attention. Multitasking requires that this attention be divided amongst different tasks. As a result, the some of the attention used for a certain task must now be used for other tasks, which affects the factors needed to complete it. Referring to an experiment that was discussed earlier, Wieth and Burns (2014) stated that even with the reward, the promise of incentive could not override the limits of people’s attention. Retaining information requires undivided attention. The key word is ‘undivided.’ According to this experiment, it is nearly impossible to have the same high level of focus while working on multiple tasks that a person would while working on one task. Once someone has reached the end of their attention span, their performance begins to falter. In a final experiment involving media multitasking and attention, Ralph, Thomson, Cheyne, and Smilek (2014) stated that multitasking can lead to mind wandering and lapses in attention, which distracts people from their tasks. These results show that once their attention is divided, it can lead to distractions and difficulty completing different tasks. It is difficult to complete one assignment while focusing on several others at the same time. Multitasking affects the attention needed for a task, which can affect everything
A popular subject within psychology is that of selective attention, particularly visual, auditory or visual and auditory attention (Driver, 2001). There are many theories of visual and auditory attention that provide us with a greater understanding of the ways in which humans attend to different stimuli (Driver, 2001), such as Broadbent’s (1958) filter theory of attention for example. This essay will compare and contrast theories of visual and auditory attention as well as discussing how well these theories explain how we attend to objects. The essay will consist of three auditory attention theories of Broadbent’s filter theory, Treisman’s (1964) attenuation theory, and Deutsch and Deutsch’s (1963) late selection model of attention; and two models of visual attention known as the spotlight model, such as Treisman and Gelade’s (1980) feature integration model, and the zoom-lens model of visual attention (see Styles, 2006).
Young adults who habitually play video games have been shown to outperform novices in a variety of visual attentional capabilities. Gamers have faster response times when detecting visual targets without a decrease in accuracy (Castel, Pratt & Drummond 2005, Yuji 1996, Dye, Green& Bavelier 2009), better target detection (Feng, Spence& Prat 2007, Green & Bavelier 2003), better visual acuity (Green & Bavelier 2007) and ability to monitor a greater number of objects simultaneously (Green & Bavelier 2006). As stated before (in part A) attention deficits are very common following a TBI (Dockree et al., 2006; Kinsella, 1998; Mathias & Wheaton, 2007). Interventions for cognitive disabilities after TBI such as attention, memory, executive function,
Attention refers to the state of applying the mind into specific information currently seen in our surroundings. W. James defines attention as the clasp possession of the mind which can do several coincidentally possible objects or train of thoughts. It also suggests recession from some things in order to handle with others effectively (Cherry, n.d.).
An area of everyday experience where divided attention is very relevant is the question of whether we can drive and talk on a mobile phone at the same time. The answer is a quite obvious ‘yes’ but the argument is that when doing this we put ourselves and others in danger because we’re not very good at it. We struggle to attend to both tasks simultaneously and to carry them out effectively. Our attentional capacity is being exceeded, often with catastrophic results (Strayer & Johnston, 2001).
way that can be a distraction, will be set aside and focus only on what is important.