ATTENTION

WHAT IS ATTENTION?• ‘Attention is the concentration

of consciousness upon one subject, rather than upon another’.

– Dumville (1938)

• ‘Attention can be defined as a process, which compels the individual to select some particular stimulus according to his interest and attitude out of the multiplicity of stimuli present in the environment’.

– R. N. Sharma (1967)

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously objects or trains of thoughts. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition, which has a real opposite in the confused, dazzled, scatterbrained state which in French is called ‘distraction’ and ‘zerstreuheit’ in German

William James

Interrelated Ideas about Attention

one is constantly confronted

with a plethora of information

there are serious limitations in

how much one can attend to. Therefore, one

selects the stimulus he/she

attends.

with sufficient practice and experience, some tasks

become less demanding of our attention

• Goal driven

• Endogenous mechanism

• Voluntary

• Slow time course

• Interpretation driven from data

•Stimulus driven

•Exogenous mechanism

•Automatic

•Rapid Transient time course

•Interpretation driven from expectations

Top Down Processes

Bottom Up Processes

Selection Theory

• the selection theory was one of the earliest theory of attention. • The theorists propounded that

one attends to the stimuli according to their physical characteristics, like colour,

intensity, etc.

Late selection

theory

Early selection

theory

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Selective Attention• Filtering or selecting: When you

try to ignore the many stimuli or events around you so you can focus on just one, the ones you are trying to ignore are distractions that must be eliminated or excluded. The mental process of eliminating those distractions, eliminating unwanted messages, is called filtering or selecting.

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Broadbent’s Filter Theory

In Broadbent’s view, the auditory mechanism acts as a selective filter; regardless of how many competing channels or messages are coming in, the filter can be tuned, or switched, to any one of the messages, based on characteristics such as loudness or pitch.

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Broadbent’s filter theory of selective attention

COCKTAIL PARTY EFFECT• Introduced by Cherry (1953), this theory

focuses on the individual’s ability to attend to a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations.

• The experiment was conducted on dichotic listening task.

• The subjects were asked to listen to two different messages from a single loudspeaker at the same time and try to separate them; and only repeat one message and not the other, known as 'shadowing' task.

• His work revealed that the ability to separate sounds from background noise is based on the characteristics of the sound, such as gender of the speaker, direction from which the sound is coming, the pitch or the speaking speed.

• When the messages were similar in characteristics, subjects were unable to complete the task successfully.

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Selective Attention and the Cocktail Party Effect

(cont.)Shadowing Task

A task devised by E. Colin Cherry. In this task, Cherry recorded spoken messages of different sorts on tape, then played the tape to a subject who was wearing headphones. The subject’s task was to “shadow” or repeat the message to the right ear out loud as soon as it was heard. In most of the experiments, subjects were also told to ignore the other message, the one coming to the left ear.

Conclusions: Subjects could report accurately on a variety of physical characteristics of the unattended (left ear) message, but were unable to notice other things about it.