ATTENUATION MODEL
Our sensory systems are continually bombarded by sights, sounds, smells and other signals from the external environment. From moment to moment one possible train is taken to exclusion of many others. Some internal or external events dominate consciousness and others are barely noticed or not noticed at all. Attention refers to selecting certain stimuli from among may and focusing cognitive resources on those selected.
Selective attention
In real life, hundreds of stimulus impinges on our senses but we attend to only a few. Thus, there is a purpose in our attention and it is selected purposive in nature. The selective aspect of attention has been recognized by almost all, in spite of divestible application of its concept. In …show more content…
Instead she proposed a modification of the filter theory that would render the notion of filtering in selective attention compatible with facts pointing to more complete analysis of more rejected information. The essence of modification is that filtering is not an all or non affair. She suggested that the filter does not cut off rejected message entirely, but instead attenuates their strength. Thus, under same conditions the weakened signals can still contact higher level elements of the perceptual systems. (fig …show more content…
The intensity threshold required for recognition also plays a part. A word is perceived if its stimulus intensity remains sufficiently high after the filter to exceed its recognition threshold: this is denoted by the long arrow reaching the perceptual channel in the figure. Other stimuli are attenuated too much to reach their recognition thresholds.
Treisman thought of as a two stage filtering process: firstly, filtering based on incoming channel characteristics, and secondly, filtering by the threshold settings of the dictionary units. Treisman proposed attenuation theory as a means to explain how unattended stimuli sometimes came to be processed in a more rigorous manner than what Broadbent's filter model could account for. As a result, attenuation theory added layers of sophistication to Broadbent's original idea of how selective attention might operate: claiming that instead of a filter which barred unattended inputs from ever entering awareness, it was a process of attenuation. Thus, the attenuation of unattended stimuli would make it difficult, but not impossible to extract meaningful content from irrelevant inputs, so long as stimuli still possessed sufficient "strength" after attenuation to make it through a hierarchical analysis
Our sensory systems are continually bombarded by sights, sounds, smells and other signals from the external environment. From moment to moment one possible train is taken to exclusion of many others. Some internal or external events dominate consciousness and others are barely noticed or not noticed at all. Attention refers to selecting certain stimuli from among may and focusing cognitive resources on those selected.
Selective attention
In real life, hundreds of stimulus impinges on our senses but we attend to only a few. Thus, there is a purpose in our attention and it is selected purposive in nature. The selective aspect of attention has been recognized by almost all, in spite of divestible application of its concept. In …show more content…
Instead she proposed a modification of the filter theory that would render the notion of filtering in selective attention compatible with facts pointing to more complete analysis of more rejected information. The essence of modification is that filtering is not an all or non affair. She suggested that the filter does not cut off rejected message entirely, but instead attenuates their strength. Thus, under same conditions the weakened signals can still contact higher level elements of the perceptual systems. (fig …show more content…
The intensity threshold required for recognition also plays a part. A word is perceived if its stimulus intensity remains sufficiently high after the filter to exceed its recognition threshold: this is denoted by the long arrow reaching the perceptual channel in the figure. Other stimuli are attenuated too much to reach their recognition thresholds.
Treisman thought of as a two stage filtering process: firstly, filtering based on incoming channel characteristics, and secondly, filtering by the threshold settings of the dictionary units. Treisman proposed attenuation theory as a means to explain how unattended stimuli sometimes came to be processed in a more rigorous manner than what Broadbent's filter model could account for. As a result, attenuation theory added layers of sophistication to Broadbent's original idea of how selective attention might operate: claiming that instead of a filter which barred unattended inputs from ever entering awareness, it was a process of attenuation. Thus, the attenuation of unattended stimuli would make it difficult, but not impossible to extract meaningful content from irrelevant inputs, so long as stimuli still possessed sufficient "strength" after attenuation to make it through a hierarchical analysis