part B  

 

 

 

Human experience encompasses a vast course of information which needs to be extracted and selectively attended to. This mental process originating in the 1950s is known as attention. William James (1890) famously defined attention as “it is taking possession of by the mind, in clear and vivid form of one out of what seem several simultaneous possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence it implies withdrawal from some things to deal effectively with others” his words clearly state how selective attention is however consciousness can't be regarded as being identical to it and should be studied as another aspect of cognition. discussed here are some models of attention that have been influential in cognitive psychology. 

 First the difference between selective attention and focused attention should be identified. Selective attention allows us to primarily focus on a single target stimulus whilst divided attention requires focus on more than one stimulus concurrently. A phenomenon occurs when an individual name is heard in a noisy room which is evidence for the ability to selectively attend to a stimulus without conscious effort. In dichotic listening both ears receive a single input, shadowing occurs by masking one of the inputs with active vocalization of the other input, a subject is then asked to attend to one message only. Cherry (1953) used shadowing to study the cocktail party effect. More recently neuroscientific research discovered that children lacked the ability of focused attention if their auditory channel was encountered by background noise suggesting their brains are still developing this neural processing. In dual tasking two or more inputs are required to be attended too. Dichotic listening was used to support Broadbent (1958) filter model of attention) he concluded that messages are ear to ear not in chronological order. According to the model only information with physical characteristics is allowed to be filtered by a sensory buffer, any sensory information kept in in the sensory buffer may fade away or decay.  

A filter that primarily selects physical characteristics from sensory inputs is shared by another model which was attention by Anne Treisman in 1964. In contrast to Broadbent's model the stimulus held in the sensory buffer are attenuated rather than processed later. This means their processed with decreased intensity E.E attending to a small buzzing noise in your ear instead of loud noises of traffic. To test attenuation a shadow task was used like in Broadbent's model however the difference was the messages presented to both ears were the same with a two second delay before the non-shadowed message. This delay resulted in the participant acknowledging there was a difference between the messages. In a second experiments using bilingual participants the shadowed message was in French with a small duration in-between both messages. The results were cohesive with the prior the shadowed message was processed based off its meaning. Anne Treisman concluded physical characterizes like the tone of Somone's voice was processed first before meaningful stimulus are processed discarding irrelevant stimulus to be weakened like the volume of music being turned down.  

In the late selection model by Deutsch and Deutsch (1963) implies all information is processes however onll some of it is brought into conscious awareness. Unlike Broadbent's model of attention the filter is placed near the end to select infmtion that is most relevant or pertinent which is why its alsi reffered to as the pertience model.  

Our minds can attend to stimulus either selectively or dividedly however we also perceive it. Perception is the act of receiving and interpreting information which reaches us by our sensory organs. An interesting example of an object that can be seen differently after a duration of time is the Necker cube which can be seen in two ways facing one way at first, however it seems to change as the front of the cube appears to be at the back which highlights how perception can alternate between two separate mental constructs from a set of lines. (Nicky sue Orrel 1987 psychology an introduction)