Broadbent's, Treisman's, and Deutsch and Deutsch Models of Attention are all bottleneck models because they predict we cannot consciously attend to all of our sensory input at the same time. Kahneman however states that we are able to attend to more than one input at a time and is more concerned with capacity.
Broadbent started with his work with air traffic controllers during the war, where a number of competing messages from departing and incoming aircraft were arriving continuously, all requiring attention. The air traffic controller has to decide which is most important so they can deal with one thing at a time. Broadbent designed an experiment (dichotic listening) to investigate the processes involved in switching attention which are presumed …show more content…
Whether or not information is selected is dependent on how relevant it is at the time.
Deutsch & Deutsch model explains the process of focused attention more simply and it seems unlikely that all information should be processed semantically before we are made aware of it. This suggestion is backed up by evidence that we are better at spotting key words in attended messages than unattended messages - according to Deutsch & Deutsch we should be equally as good at each.
Kahneman's capacity model (1973) states that sometimes we are able to attend to more than one input at a time. This notion of divided attention led him to suggest that a limited amount of attention is allocated to tasks by a central processor. Many factors determine how much attentional capacity can be allocated and how much is needed for each task. Kahneman also provided a more flexible explanation of attention than the focused attention theorists did. He believed we can attend to more than one thing at a time, particularly if we are skilled at a task. However, the capacity model fails to explain exactly how the allocation decisions are made. There is flexibility in attention, like we
Broadbent started with his work with air traffic controllers during the war, where a number of competing messages from departing and incoming aircraft were arriving continuously, all requiring attention. The air traffic controller has to decide which is most important so they can deal with one thing at a time. Broadbent designed an experiment (dichotic listening) to investigate the processes involved in switching attention which are presumed …show more content…
Whether or not information is selected is dependent on how relevant it is at the time.
Deutsch & Deutsch model explains the process of focused attention more simply and it seems unlikely that all information should be processed semantically before we are made aware of it. This suggestion is backed up by evidence that we are better at spotting key words in attended messages than unattended messages - according to Deutsch & Deutsch we should be equally as good at each.
Kahneman's capacity model (1973) states that sometimes we are able to attend to more than one input at a time. This notion of divided attention led him to suggest that a limited amount of attention is allocated to tasks by a central processor. Many factors determine how much attentional capacity can be allocated and how much is needed for each task. Kahneman also provided a more flexible explanation of attention than the focused attention theorists did. He believed we can attend to more than one thing at a time, particularly if we are skilled at a task. However, the capacity model fails to explain exactly how the allocation decisions are made. There is flexibility in attention, like we