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). People that are more logically
oriented, or left-brained, are likely to perform the task asked of them. In opposition, people with a more subjective thought process, or right-brained, are more inclined to be inattentive and less likely to complete the exercise. As a result of this, students with an subjective mind have a higher likelihood of noticing the person walk through the video, despite being urged to count the amount of times the white balloon was touched.
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 ...
One of the most common American proverbs is the expression to “never judge a book by its cover”. This saying, used for more than just books, is commonly used to express that what is on the appearance of something might not always show that things true nature or content. Even so people will often forget this fact and rely on their own perception. So what does this say about perception? To Victor Hugo author of the novel Les Misérables this would probable show that human perception is flawed and that people trust it more than they should. In Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables he suggests that by following only our perception will not always lead to the truth, with the characters of Thénardier, Jean Valjean, and Inspecter Javert.
Interference and facilitation are two important aspects of automatic processes. Interference refers to the range to which one process encumbers performance of another, whereas facilitation indicates the extent to which one process assists performance of another.
people who are in a line. The 5 people all have a ball; all the balls
It is often thought that humans can receive all the information that invades their senses, however, it is fact they are not able to process all of the received information. Humans must selectively choose what information to perceive and ignore irrelevant information. Two questions are raised, therefore: what allows us to selectively attend information and what happens to unattended information, is it proceeded to any extend or not proceeded at all? Recently, the phenomenon of negative-priming started to be used to study selective attention.
There have been many experiments done on depth of processing and the self reference effect. The Depth of Processing model of memory maintains that how deep something is encoded into a person's memory depends on using certain types of processing. This relates to the self reference effect because it is believed that people have the tendency to remember something better when they can relate it to themselves. People who can personally relate to something have the tendency to embed it deeper into their memory.
Driver, J. (2001) ‘A selective review of selective attention research from the past century’ British Journal of Psychology 92, pp53-78
Attention refers to the cognitive process of selecting concentrating on aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. Focused attention refers to the ability to respond tactile or discretely to stimuli. The human brain divides attention in two style, either, automatic attention or controlled attention. Automatic attention is a specific stimulus that does not interfere with the other mental processes and needs little effort. The controlled attention is mainly relies on serial processing, and affects other mental processes, of which it is responsible for self-regulation (Jamie Hale, 2012). Divided attention takes pace when we are required to do two tasks or even more at the same time and all the tasks require attention. Driving a car whistling chatting on a mobile phone is a good example of a divided attention. While operating with a divided attention while multi-tasking, at least one of the tasks attention declines.
Perhaps many people did experience: while searching for a spot they failed to notice their friends waving at them because their attention was fully focused on finding a spot that even when they looked right at their friends, they did not see them. The accuracy of visual representations has been of an increasing interest in the past 20 years. Many studies from the 1970s to the 1980s were conducted. The observers in these studies were engaged in a continuous task where they only focused on a certain angle and ignored other angles. An unexpected event happens, most of the observers however reported not seeing anything knowing that the visibility was clear to the subjects who weren’t taking part in focusing on the dynamic scene. There was a demonstration on the past few years that stated that the one of the main requirements of conscious perception is requiring attention. When attention is put on a new thing or event, subjects fail to notice the unexpected object even when it’s been there fixed. This is what we call inattentional blindness which is regarded as failure to notice an unexpected event or object even if it is in one’s field of vision because other tasks catching the person’s attention are being performed. This kind of experiments states that attention is mandatory for detecting change even though not sufficient. Attention is crucial to perception because without attention, the perception of visual features of our environment does not occur. One of the studies put observers to view two simultaneous events. The first event showed a hand-slapping game in which there were two players, one extending his hands, and the other player placing his hands on his opponent’s. The other event was of three p...
This essay concerns attention and theories that have been proposed for it. Although there is no widely accepted definition of attention there has been many attempts to explain it such as attention refers to selectively focusing on one stimulus and ignoring other aspects of the environment therefore being a limited resource of cognition (in Smith & Kossyln, 2007). Theories implemented into the nature of attention are many and varied and mainly derive from information processing theories. This essay will specifically examine focused attention approaches to attention. These models are particularly concerned with how we are able to selectively attend information yet reject others and irrelevant information (in Eysenck & Keane, 2005). Such theories of early selection will be discussed; Broadbent’s (1958 in Lachman & Buttersfield, 1979) filter model which has been of particular importance to psychologists and Triesman’s attenuation model which has also been widely recognised (in Smith & Kossyln, 2007). However, before we look in to this it is important that we identify with one of the famous pioneers in focused auditory attention whose work has received immense popularity.
The phenomenon of ‘Divided attention’ is the idea that an individual has the ability to divide their attention between two or more tasks (multi- tasking). Focused attention models such as Broadbent’s theory, Treisman’s theory and Deutsch and Deutsch model explains how all our inputs are focused on one task at a time, however it is clear from looking at everyday life that we are able to divide our attention, successfully being able to complete more than one task at the same time.
There are several parts that connect to attention such as selective attention, cocktail party affect, intentional blindness, perceptual load model, multitasking, and training consciousness. Selective attention is the ability to focus awareness on a specific feature in the environment while ignoring others. This occurs on a daily basis and can be seen in how people pay attention to something and how much attention is given at that time. It is impossible to give attention to everything that goes on in the world; we use selective attention to select what events in our daily lives are important. The cocktail party effect is hearing your name in spite of numerous distractions that is going on around you. The cocktail party effect also goes along with the intentional blindness which is when one has been accused of something. Focusing on these areas needs to be given a lot of attention and your consciousness needs to be aware of all these areas. One important part of awareness is the perceptual load model which is where you have limited capacity. When this happens you either turn down the radio while reading or focusing on another thing beside the radio. This is the ability to maintain or focus on a target or idea without another distraction. Multitasking is when you shift your attention. It is a rapid switching from one task to another and it really
way that can be a distraction, will be set aside and focus only on what is important.
I agree with the concept of selective attention because I have seen the characteristics of selective attention in myself, as well as in others. Selective attention does affect a lot of people because it is very easy to lose sight of things when you are focused on getting something done. In Essentials of Psychology, the author discusses
Some may call paying attention between multiple things ‘multi-tasking’, but multi-tasking is nothing but a myth. "People can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves," said neuroscientist at MIT Earl Miller. And, he said, "Switching from task to task, you think you're actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you're actually switching between them very rapidly." Miller also pointed out that one of the reasons switching happens is that similar tasks vie to use the same part of the brain. "You cannot focus on one while doing the other. That's because of what's called interference between the two tasks," Miller said.