Attention is “taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought...it implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others” (James, 1898).
Selective attention is when a person focuses on their conscious awareness on a particular stimulus. The person only attends to one or a few tasks at one time, this is necessary to keep the person from being overloaded with information. One of the main functions of attention is selective hearing, which attends to some stimuli and ignores others.
This essay will be focusing on attention, specifically selective attention. In some research that is to do with selective attention, participants are presented with two or more sets of stimuli at the same time. The participants process one set of stimuli while they are ignoring the other stimulus. The amount of processing of the ignored stimuli that happens then provides an indication to how successful attention can be focused on to, that specific stimulus that is important to the experimenter. This essay will be looking into theories that focus on selective stimuli, such as the cocktail party phenomena theory by Cherry (1953), this theory suggests that a person’s ability is to selectively attend to one specific stimulus over others. Broadbent’s filter theory (1958) will also be looked at; this theory suggests that we filter information after sensory registration.
Also, Treisman’s attenuation model (1964) which suggests that if a meaningful message is removed from a shadowed to the non-shadowed ear, then the subjects would track the shift of it but will not be aware of it.
The essay will be looking at all of these theories, comparing the...
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...ant or not.
Works Cited
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Treisman, A. (1964). Monitoring and storage of irrelevant messages in selective attention. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 3, 449-459.
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 ...
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1) Text: Rosenzweig, Leiman, and Breedlove. 2nd Edition. Biological Psychology: An Introduction to Behavioral, Cognitive, and Clinical Neuroscience. Sinauer Associates, Massachusetts, 1999.
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Though the experiment shows that attention is vital for change detection, we should consider the size/ impact of the change in the environment. If the change to an environment is small, would it result in the change being detected? Do providing little clues draw attention effectively to where the change is being made? In support of this argument, Rensink (1997) showed that even with small clues, if the clue is not directed properly then detecting change will not have an effect. A proposal of Rensink is that the absence of attention will cause visual contents to be missed. On the other hand, Simon and Levin (1998) suggest that a person could miss things happening in their environment if his or her attention is occupied by something
Lorenzi, C., Gatehouse, S., & Lever, C. (1999). Sound localization in noise in normal hearing listeners. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 105 (3), 1810-1820.
Macleod and Mathews (1991) induced attentional biases within a laboratory setting to determine that a ca...
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The way that our brain processes information and responds to the awareness of things is a very complex system with in the brain. One study mentioned talks about the integration of senses in the brain and how we process the information. “Another study better illustrates the integrative nature of this synchrony. Words were presented in various locations on a screen; whether the subject became aware of the word’s color or if its location-indicated by being able to recall is later-depended on whether a frontal or temporal area was activated during the presentation. But if the individual registered both the color and the location, additional activity occurred in a part of the parietal cortex (Uncapher, Otten, & Rugg, 2006).” (Garrett, pg.501) This research demonstrates how different people react differently to stimuli and different levels of their cognition and awareness. It is important for people to develop a sense of awareness in order to function fully in the world. The book argues “that one apparent advantage is that it enables consistency and a playfulness in our behavior that would not be possible otherwise. (Garrett, pg. 502) It is human nature to rely on a consistency and the ability to plan ahead which is why the function of awareness is so important to the human
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Balota, D. A. and Marsh, E.J. Cognitive psychology. Key Readings. (2004) Hove: East Sussex: Psychology Press.
Attention is defined as “notice taken of someone or something; the regarding of someone or something as interesting or important”.
Sternberg, R. J. (1999). Cognitive psychology (2nd ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers