Donald Broadbent: A Summary Biography Of This Cognitive Psychologist
The history of humanity has left us people and celebrities whose echo of wisdom still impacts our modern world today. Many of his research, works and studies were the basis for the development of today’s knowledge.
In this article we will talk about a very relevant person in the field of cognitive psychology: Donald Broadbent. We will find out who this researcher was through a brief biography of Donald Broadbent aspects of his scientific career, what were his most relevant contributions and what he based these contributions on.
Donald Eric Broadbent FRS (Fellow Royal Society) was an experimental psychologist born in Birmingham in 1926 and died in 1993 at the age of 66. His career was focused on cognitive psychology which is the area of psychology that focuses on cognition, that is, on those mental processes involved in knowledge.
As his name suggests, Donald was a member of the Royal Society. This is an honorary title awarded to senior scientists, nationals or residents of the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland (scientists of other nationalities may belong as foreign members). This title is chosen by the members of the Royal Society themselves, and implies that members have made “a substantial contribution to the improvement of knowledge.”
Donald Broadbent focused his career on the scientific field of psychology. A 2002 survey by the Review of General Psychology, a scientific journal born from the American Psychological Association, ranked Broadbent as the 54th most cited psychologist, at the level of scientific articles, of the 20th century
Donald Broadbent studied at the University of Cambridge, becoming in 1958 the director of the Applied Psychology Research Unit, a unit that was previously created by the Medical Research Council of the United Kingdom in 1994.
Much of his work focused on practical problems in the military or private industry, always combined with theoretical work. His work career gained recognition for his two theories: theory of Selective Attention and theory of short-term memory carried out with the help of the first computer tools, necessary for their analyzes of human cognition.
Both theories are combined to form what is known as the Single Channel Hypothesis, called “The Donald Broadbent Filter Model.” This concept proposes that the physical characteristics (for example, tone) of an auditory message are used to focus attention only on the specific message.
This implies that irrelevant messages are filtered by the brain before the stimulus information is processed for meaning.
Contributions to Cognitive Psychology
Donald Broadbent was one of the pioneers of cognitive psychology, also known as cognitivism The term cognitive means the act of knowledge, which includes the actions of storing, retrieving, recognizing, understanding, organizing and using the information received through the senses.
This discipline of psychology has as its focus the study of the basic and deep mechanisms through which knowledge is elaborated from perception, memory and learning, to the development of simple and complex concepts, as well as logical reasoning.
Donald Broadbent’s theories are developed around cognitive psychology, and specifically, based on attention filter models.
The filter model is a theory of psychology that states that a person’s attention is focused on the information that is filtered through the brain. This consists of receiving information, and of this information, a fragment will go to the sensory flow (that of the senses) and will be processed in the central processing channel, and the other information will not (selective attention).
In the case of Donald Broadbent’s filter model, it is a filter that we call “precategorical”, that is, the filter goes before the semantic analysis of the information In other words, the stimuli appear first, which are stored in the sensory area. And later the filter would act, which would select the information.
This information would be stored in short-term memory (a channel of limited capacity), and eventually some information would pass into long-term memory. Sensory memory retains information temporarily.
The proposed filter is rigid and selective, since it chooses a fragment of the sensory stream and gives access to the central channel, while the rest of the irrelevant information is lost
Research on the attentional model
Specifically, Donald Broadbent’s attentional filter model postulates the existence of a theoretical filter device, located in the brain, that relates incoming sensory registration and short-term memory storage.
This means that this filter allows the person to handle two types of stimuli displayed at the same time. So When two stimuli are received at the same time, one of them remains on standby in the brain for later processing, while the other is recorded This filter prevents short-term memory overload.
This theory by Donald Broadbent was based on the following experiment: three different pairs of digits were presented simultaneously, three digits in one ear and another three digits in the other ear.
Most participants remembered the digits ear to ear, rather than pair by pair. For example, if 382 was presented in one ear and 497 in the other, participants remembered the figure 382497 together, instead of 348927 (widely).
Authors who leave their mark
They say the difference between fame and prestige is that with fame, people know you; With prestige, on the other hand, it is the important people who know you. Taking this into account, Donald Broadbent was a prestigious man, known for his contributions to experimental psychology and basic psychology.
This is demonstrated by the fact that he was a member of the Royal Society, and that annually, a conference in honor of Donald Broadbent takes place at the British Psychological Society.
Besides, His work led him to obtain two highly prestigious awards from the scientific community ; the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology in 1975, and the William James Award in 1989.
