It is essential that humans focus on specific objects as they would not be able to perform one action at a time, and humans see their world in objects. Another purpose of attention is so that actions can be directed and controlled (Allport, 1987 cited in Naish 2010). It is important to research this in order to optimise health and safety and performance in occupational fields and make further discoveries in clinical neuropsychology. Some debates rage around how we attend to objects through our auditory and visual processes. Early selection theorists argue that all extraneous information is filtered out at an early stage and is ignored completely. The brain has limited capacity to deal with all the stimuli surrounding the object. From this Broadbent (1958 cited in Naish 2010) devised his influential Filter Theory, an early selection theory in auditory research. Treisman (1980 cited in Naish 2010) was an attenuation theorist and her Feature Integration Theory was also extremely influential, arguing some extraneous material is attended to before filtering. This essay will explore both theories and their contribution to our understanding of perception. It will make comparisons between the theories and the two senses. It will conclude that the research has made major contributions, but none has provided sufficient evidence to fully address the issues. Whether superfluous information is attended to or not, might depend on volume.
Whilst some auditory researchers were interested in the Cocktail Party effect (how we focus on one conversation over others at a noisy party), Broadbent’s main interest was research for the UK Military. A notable project for him was considering how fighter pilots could pick out relevant radio mess...
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...tudies in neuroscience could make a contribution to the debate by revealing the serial and/or parallel processing of the brain in detecting brain pathways and oscillations (Schyns 2011). More natural studies could be considered using brain imaging during normal day to day lives to increase ecological validity, across modalities.
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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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Historically, cognitive psychology was unified by an approach based on an resemblance between the mind and a computer, (Eysenck and Keane, 2010). Cognitive neuroscientists argue convincingly that we need to study the brain while people engage in cognitive tasks. Clearly, the internal processes involved in human cognition occur in the brain, and several sophisticated ways of studying the brain in action, including various imaging techniques, now exist, (Sternberg and Wagner, 1999, page 34).Neuroscience studies how the activity of the brain is correlated with cognitive operations, (Eysenck and Keane, 2010). On the other hand, cognitive neuropsychologists believe that we can draw general conclusions about the way in which the intact mind and brain work from mainly studying the behaviour of neurological patients rather than their physiology, (McCarthy and Warrington, 1990).
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When I was in the military, an important part of my job was to listen to radio communications and be aware of any other communication going on in the office. At first, this task was stressful but with time and practice my auditory attention was responding more efficiently. At that time I did not know that some researchers use a similar task called Dichotic Listening Task to conduct research and support their theories. In 1958, Donald Broadbent, an experimental psychologist, used Dichotic Listening Task and the results of his experiment led him to create the filter model of attention. Essentially, the task consists of presenting different stimuli to each ear. First, the participant’s task is to focus his attention to one ear, called the attended
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Attention is defined as “notice taken of someone or something; the regarding of someone or something as interesting or important”.
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
Keil, F. C. and Wilson, R. A. (1999) The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press
There are many different Visual Perception principles in perception. The main principles are Gestalt. Gestalt is a German word meaning 'form' or 'shape'. Gestalt psychologists formulated a series of principles that describe how t...