Every day and every second we are exposed to a large flow of audio information. The buzz of cars in the city bustle, the conversation of colleagues at work, the buzz of household appliances－ and this is only a small part of the sound factors affecting us every minute. Can you imagine what would happen if every such moment diverted our attention? But most of the noise we simply ignore and do not perceive. Why it happens?
Imagine being at your friend's party in a busy restaurant. A large number of sound effects, clink of wine glasses and glasses, many other sounds - all of them are trying to capture your attention. But amid all this noise, you prefer to focus on the funny story your friend is telling. How do you manage to ignore all the other sounds and listen to your friend’s story?
This is an example of the concept of selective attention. Its other name is selective or selective attention.
Definition
Selective attention is simply the emphasis on focusing on a specific object for a certain period of time, while ignoring non-essential information that also occurs.
Since our ability to keep track of things around us is limited both as far as possible and in duration, and it is directly influenced by individual psychological characteristics of a person, we must be selective in what we pay attention to. Attention acts like a spotlight, emphasizing the details that we need to focus on, and filtering out information that we do not need.
The degree of selective attention that can be applied to a situation depends on the person and his ability to concentrate on certain circumstances. It also depends on distractions in the environment. Selective attention can be a conscious effort, but it can also occur subconsciously.
How does selective attention work?
Some studies show that selective attention is the result of a skill that helps keep memories.
Since the individual psychological characteristics of the personality and working memory can contain only a limited amount of information, we often have to filter out unnecessary information. People are often inclined to pay attention to what appeals to their feelings, or to what is familiar to them.
For example, when you are hungry, you are more likely to pay attention to the smell of fried chicken, rather than the sound of the phone ringing. This is especially important if chicken is one of your favorite foods.
Selective attention can also be used to purposefully attract interest in an object or person. Many marketing agencies are developing ways to get people's selective attention using colors, sounds, and even tastes. Have you ever noticed that some restaurants or shops offer a tasting of food at lunchtime, when you are likely to be hungry and will surely taste the offered samples, after which the probability of going to their restaurant or cafe will increase significantly. In this case, visual and auditory attention takes hold of your senses, while the noise or activity of the crowd of customers around you is simply ignored.
“In order to maintain our attention to one event in everyday life, we need to filter out other events,” explains author Russell Rellin in his text, “Cognition: Theory and Practice.” “We should be selective in our attention, focusing on some events to the detriment of others, because attention is a resource that must be left for important events.”
Selective Visual Attention
There are two main models that describe how visual attention works.
- The spotlight model assumes that visual attention works in the same way as a spotlight. Psychologist William James suggested that such a mechanism includes a focal point in which everything is clearly visible. The area surrounding this point, known as the edge, is still visible, but not obvious.
- The second approach is known as the zoom lens model. Although it contains all the same elements of the searchlight model, it additionally suggests that we can increase or decrease the size of our focus in the same way as the camera’s zoom lens. However, a significant focus area leads to slower processing, since it includes a significant flow of information, so the limited attention resources should be distributed over a larger area.
Selective auditory attention
Some of the most famous auditory attention experiments are those conducted by psychologist Edward Colin Cherry.
Cherry investigated how people can track specific conversations. The phenomenon he called the “cocktail” effect.
In these experiments, two messages were presented simultaneously through auditory perception. Cherry found that when the contents of an automatic message were suddenly switched (for example, switching from English to German or suddenly playing back), few of the participants noticed this.
It is interesting to note that if the speaker of the automatic broadcast message switched from male to female (or vice versa), or if the message was replaced with a 400 Hz tone, participants always noticed a change.
Cherry's findings have been demonstrated in additional experiments. Other researchers have received similar auditory perceptions, including word lists and musical melodies.
Selective Focus Resource Theories
In later theories, attention is seen as a limited resource. The subject of study is how these resources are divorced from competing sources of information. Such theories suggest that we have a fixed amount of attention and we need to find out how we distribute its available reserves among many tasks or events.
“The theory of oriented resources has been criticized as overly broad and vague. Indeed, it may be different in explaining all aspects of attention, but it satisfies the theory of filters, ”Robert Sternberg suggests in his text“ Cognitive Psychology ”, summarizing various theories of selective attention. “Filters and bottlenecks in attention theory are more appropriate metaphors for competing tasks, which seem to be incompatible ... Resource theory seems to be the best metaphor for explaining the phenomena of divided attention to complex tasks.”
There are two patterns that are associated with selective attention. These are Broadbent and Traisman's attention patterns. They are also referred to as narrow patterns of attention because they explain that we cannot simultaneously monitor each input of information at a conscious level.
Conclusion
Selective attention in psychology is studied quite thoroughly, and the conclusions drawn are quite different from each other. One of the most influential psychological models of selective attention was the Broadbent filter model, invented in 1958.
He suggested that many signals entering the central nervous system in parallel with each other are stored for a very short time in a temporary “buffer”. At this stage, the signals are analyzed for such factors as location in space, tonal quality, size, color, or other basic physical properties.
Then they are passed through a selective “filter”, which allows signals with the corresponding properties necessary for a person to pass through one channel for further analysis.
Some of the information with a lower priority stored in the buffer cannot pass this step until the buffer expires. Elements lost in this way do not further influence behavior.