Selective Attention: Definition, Examples And Theories That Explain It
One of those interesting psychological concepts is the one that we will explain today, through its definition and the theories that have addressed it. We are talking about selective attention
The selective attention also called focused attentionmake reference to the ability of an organism to focus its mind on a specific stimulus or task, despite the presence of other environmental stimuli. In other words, it is when a person gives preference to certain stimuli and is able to attend to the relevant stimuli and inhibit distractors. Its function is essential due to the limitation of attentional capacity.
To exemplify this, you can imagine that you have a shelf full of shoes, and that, since you are going to run with some friends, you need running shoes. When you have to look for the shoes to wear, this task requires selective attention, so you focus your attention on the ‘sneakers’ to find and wear them.
Theories that explain selective attention
There are several theoretical models that seek to explain the functioning of selective attention. The best known are those of Broadbent, Treisman, and Deutsch and Deutsch. All of these models are known as filter or bottleneck models because they predict that we cannot serve all of the inputs sensory at the same time, so they try to explain why the material that passes through the filter is selected.
But what characterizes each model? Below we explain it to you.
Broadbent Rigid Filter Model
He Donald Broadbent model It is one of the best known when trying to explain attention processing and specifically selective attention. A work that began with the study of traffic controllers during the war. Broadbent noticed that these professionals because they receive many continuous messages that require attention, and they are faced with a situation in which they can only deal with one message at a time, so they have to decide which is the most important. Broadbent designed an experiment with “dichotic listening” to investigate the processes involved in shifting attentional focus.
Broadbent thinks that The information from all the stimuli that are presented at a given moment enters the “sensory buffer” (buffer center) also called short term warehouse. One of the inputs is selected by its physical characteristics to pass the filter. Since we have a limited capacity to process information, the filter is designed to prevent the information processing system from becoming overwhelmed.
Sensory inputs that are not selected remain briefly in the sensory buffer, and if not they disappear quickly. Broadbent assumed that the filter rejected unattended messages in the initial phases of processing.
His research and the task of dichotic listening
In his investigations, I wanted to know how individuals were able to focus attention selectively and to do so he deliberately overloaded them with stimuli. The subjects received a lot of information, too much to process at the same moment.
One of the ways Broadbent achieved this was by sending simultaneous and different messages (a three-digit number) to the right and left ears. Participants were asked to repeat them while listening to both messages. What is known as the “dichotic listening task”.
The scientist was interested in knowing how the digits would be repeated. Would they respond in the order they had heard it? Broadbent observed that the digits of a channel were always repeated together. For example, if the left ear heard 673 and the left ear 987, the subjects responded 673,987, or 987,673. A response of type 867637 was never obtained, in which there would be alternation between channels.
The results of Broadbent’s research
The results of his research led him to affirm that we can only pay attention to one channel at a time (in dichotic listening each ear is a channel, so the other is lost). The information that is lost will depend on the characteristics of the stimulus and the needs of the organism. Furthermore, as already mentioned, the filter, which selects a channel for attention, does this taking into account physical characteristics: for example, the ear through which the information came in, the type of voice. Therefore, the meaning of what is said is not taken into account at any time in the filter. All semantic processing, that is, understanding what the message says, takes place after the filter.
This model has received quite a bit of criticism, for example, does not precisely define the nature and functions of the processing system does not provide sufficient information regarding how information can be transferred from one store to another, and considers working memory as a passive store.
The Treisman attenuated filter model
Selective attention requires that stimuli be filtered in order to direct attention. As explained above, Broadbent suggested that selecting material for attention (i.e. filtering) is done before semantic analysis Well, Treisman’s model maintains this idea of a filter, but with the difference that instead of eliminating the material, it attenuates it. Dimming is like turning down the volume, so if you have four stimuli in a room (a crying baby, the television, a person talking on the phone, and the radio) you can turn down the volume on three to focus on the remaining stimulus.
Unattended material appears to be lost, but if an unattended channel includes your name, for example, you might hear it because the material is there. In other words, the relevant message passes through the filter, but the irrelevant ones are attenuated so as not to overload the central processing mechanism. Irrelevant messages receive some type of analysis, which is why some outstanding feature is detected and our attention is diverted to those channels.
The Deustch and Deustch late filter model
The Deustch and Deustch model states that all stimuli are analyzed and achieve a meaning in order to select the input that will pass into total consciousness The selection of this input occurs depending on how important the stimulus is at that moment.
Unlike the Broadbent and Treisman models, the stimuli are not filtered at the beginning of the cognitive process, but rather the filter would be present later in said process, and its main function would be to select the information that passes to active memory.
