Psychology Week 6: Understanding Attention

Study Notes

Attention enables us to become aware of mental content.
Attention controls our mental environment by choosing/selecting the events that will enter consciousness.
There are multiple aspects of attention, including selective attention, divided attention, and attentional capture.

Attention became an important topic of research in the 1950s.
This was partially due to the practical reason of technology developed during World War II, which placed humans in situations where they were overwhelmed with information for long periods.

Broadbent's Model: proposes that information passes through stages, including sensory buffer/memory, filter, and detector.
The filter identifies the message being attended to based on physical characteristics, such as tone of voice, pitch, speed, and accent.
The detector processes the information from the attended message to determine higher-level characteristics, such as meaning.

Participants are presented with a different message in each ear, delivered over stereo earphones.
They are told to pay attention to a message delivered to one ear (the attended ear) and repeat what they heard out loud (shadowing).
Results: participants were unable to report the content of the message delivered in the unattended ear and were unaware of what was said.

Proposed by Broadbent (1958) to explain how it is possible to focus on one message only and why information isn’t taken in from the other message.
The model includes stages: sensory buffer/memory, filter, and detector.
Information from the world is detected by receptors in the sense organs, which enters the sensory buffer.
The sensory buffer holds all incoming information for a fraction of a second and then transfers it to the filter.
The output of the detector is sent to short-term memory, which holds information for 10-15 seconds and transfers information into long-term memory, which can hold information indefinitely.