Selective Attention Theory

When thinking about selective attention today, one makes the connection of how much he or she pays attention to something. Selective attention then can be viewed as the process by which people find something upon which to concentrate, and the level of concentration they can continue to exert as distractions arise. The psychological definition of selective attention is the process by which a person can selectively pick out one message from a mixture of messages occurring simultaneously. What a person pays attention to in these circumstances is what they select to pay attention to, though it may be noted that selection is not necessarily conscious. Selective attention can be conscious but most of the time it is subconscious, we do not realize …show more content…
Some believe that the memory or the working attentional state can only hold so much at a time; so people filter out what they deem unnecessary or unimportant, usually without being aware of the filtering process. There are a number of theories that have linked the study of attention to the senses and to the idea of how the senses arouse focus decisions. Some psychologist that have researched this have dealt with the issue with capacity models. These theories state that we all have a limited amount of mental capacity to allocate various tasks, at any given time. It is difficult to normalize or control the amount one can store in their memory or handle at one time. Three psychologist that helped develop ideas of selective attention are Donald Broadbent, Anne Treisman, and E. Colin Cherry whom seemed to develop the most prominent theories in the …show more content…
Treisman’s theory posed less problems then Broadbents model but supported the ideas of Cherry. Treisman carried out experiments using the speech shadowing method. Typically, in this method participants are asked to simultaneously repeat aloud speech played into one ear (called the attended ear) while another message is spoken into the other ear. Treisman found that if she suddenly switched the messages to the opposite ears, in the middle of a sentence, the subjects “crossed over” to the other ear for a few seconds to complete the sentence. Unlike Broadbent’s theory, Treisman proposed that information from the unattended ear is weakened, but is not fully eliminated and can still possess meaning. Treisman also proposed that instead of a filter, attention works by utilizing an attenuator that identifies a stimulus based on physical properties or by meaning. She states, “think of the attenuator like a volume control” one can turn down the volume of other sources of information to focus on the ideas coming from a single source. Messages are processed in a systematic way, beginning with analysis of physical characteristics, patters, and individual words. After that, grammatical structure and meaning are processed. This theory predicts that it is almost always physical characteristics of unattended inputs which are remembered rather than meaning. Some physical characteristics that might account