Attention Theories

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.

Influential work surrounding auditory attention derives from Cherry’s (1953 in Eysenck Keane, 2005) cocktail party phenomenon. This effect refers to the ability to selectively attend one source of auditory information in a noisy context hence the concept of ‘party’ (in Eysenck & Keane, 2005). Investigation into where excluded information goes is demonstrated in the vast amounts of dichotic listening tasks adopted by Psychologists. Dichotic listening tasks involve the administration of headphones with different auditory stimuli’s being presented in the subjects ea...

... middle of paper ...

...h by others such as that of Broadbent’s and Triesman’s. The basic claim of Broadbent’s filter model were that there is a bottleneck in which only one input channel is allowed to pass through whilst Triesman’s model allowed several channels to pass through.

In final words, both theories provide valuable information for attentional phenomena although they may be subject to criticisms.

References

Smith, E. E. and Kosslyn, S. M. (2007). Cognitive Psychology: Mind and brain. (1st ed.) New Jersey: Pearson Education.

Esysenck, W. M. (1982). Attention and arousal: cognition and performance. Germany

Eysenck, M. W. and Keane, M. T. (2005). Cognitive Psychology: a student’s handbook (5th ed.). Hove: Psychology Press.

Lachman, R., Lachman, J.L. & Buttersfield, C.E.(1979). Cognitive Psychology and Information processing: An introduction. Hillsdale, New Jersey.