ATTENTION

Attention is the ability to choose and concentrate on relevant stimuli. Attention is the
cognitive process that makes it possible to position ourselves towards relevant stimuli and
consequently respond to it. This cognitive ability is very important and is an essential function in
our daily lives. Luckily, attention can be trained and improved with the appropriate cognitive
training.
 When we drive, we are almost constantly using all of our attentional sub-processes. We have
to be awake (arousal), we have to be able to focus our attention on the stimuli on the road
(focused attention), pay attention for long periods of time (sustained attention), keep ourselves
from getting distracted by irrelevant stimuli (selective attention), be able to change focus from
one lane to another, to the mirror, and back to your lane (alternating attention), and be able to
carry out all of the actions necessary for driving, like using the pedals, turning the wheel, and
changing gears (divided attention).
 Attention is one of the first and most important aspects of studying at home or at school.
When you study, you need to be awake and attentive to whatever you're reading or hearing.
Sustained attention is especially important when you study because reading the same
information while you try to learn can become boring and monotonous after a while.
Sustained attention helps you stay focused on studying for hours, which helps keep you from
losing time and forgetting information that you've read.
 Attention is also essential for any type of work, from office jobs that have a certain amount of
reading or writing, to air traffic controllers, athletes, cashiers, drivers, doctors, and CEOs.
Every profession requires every kind of attention.

DEFINITION OF ATTENTION
William James, “Everyone knows what attention is, focalization and concentration of
consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from something in order to deal effectively
with others and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained
state.” Principles of psychology, 1890
Titchner, “Attention a state of sensory clearness with a margin and a focus. Attention is the aspect
of consciousness that relates to the amount of effort exerted in focusing on certain aspects of an
experience, so that they become relatively vivid.”
Morgan, “Attention is being keenly alive to some specific factors in our environment. It is a
preparatory adjustment for response.”
Thus attention is essentially process and not a product. It helps in our awareness or consciousness
of our environment, which is of selective kind, because in a given time, we can concentrate or
focus our consciousness on a particular object only.
The concentration provided by the process of attention helps us in the clarity of the perception of
the perceived object or phenomenon. Thus attention is not merely a cognitive factor but is
essentially determined by emotions, interest, attitude and memory.

Thus attention is a process which is carried out through cognitive abilities and helped by
emotional and behavioural factors to select something out of the various stimuli present in one‟s
environment and bring it in the centre of one‟s consciousness in order to perceive it clearly for
deriving the desired end.

FORMS OF ATTENTION

1. On the basis of will and efforts of an individual:

a. Voluntary attention: When the „exercised will‟ is called upon, it becomes volitional
attention. Because it demands the conscious efforts on our part it is least automatic and
spontaneous
b. Involuntary attention: This type of attention is aroused without the play of will. Here we
attend to an object or condition without making any conscious effort, e.g. a mother‟s
attention towards her crying child, for example, attention towards the members of the
opposite sex, and towards bright colours, etc.
2. On the basis of individual‟s response to stimuli:
a. Covert attention: The act of mentally focusing on particular stimuli is known as covert
attention. It is thought to be the neural process that enhances the signal from a particular
part of the sensory neuron.
b. Overt Attention: The act of directing sense organs towards a stimulus source.
3. On the basis of process orient attention:
a. Selective attention: selection of a limited number of stimuli or object from a large number
of stimuli based on size, interest, intensity, attitude, etc
b. Sustained attention: ability to maintain attention on and object or event for longer duration
generally influenced by sensory modality, clarity of stimuli, temporal uncertainity and
spatial uncertainty.
DETERMINANTS OF ATTENTION:
I. External Factors or Condition:These conditions are generally those characteristics of outside
situation or stimuli which make the strongest aid for capturing our attention. These can be
classified as:
1. Nature of the stimulus: All types of stimuli are not able to bring the same degree of attention.
A picture attracts attention more readily than words. Among the pictures, the pictures of human
beings invite more attention and those of human beings related to beautiful women or handsome
men, who attract more attention. In this way an effective stimulus should always be chosen for
capturing maximum attention.
2. Intensity and size of the stimulus:
In comparison with the weak stimulus, the immense stimulus attracts more attention of an
individual. Our attention become easily directed towards a loud sound, a bright light or a strong
smell, and also a large building will be more readily attended to, than a small one.

3. Contrast, change and variety:

Change and variety strike attention more easily than sameness and absence of change, e.g. we do
not notice the ticking sound of a clock put on the wall until it stops ticking, that is any change in
the attention to which you have been attracted immediately capture your attention. The factor,
contact or change is highly responsible for capturing attention of the organism and contributes
more than the intensity, size or nature of the stimulus.

4. Repetition of stimulus:
Repetition is the factor of great importance in securing attention. Because one may ignore a
stimulus at first instance, but if it is repeated for several times it captures our attention, e.g. a
miss-spelled word is more likely to be noticed, if it occurs twice in the same paragraph than, if it
occurs only once. While giving lecture the important aspects of the speech are often repeated so
that the attention of the audience can be easily directed to the valuable points.

5. Movement of the stimulus:

The moving stimulus catches our attention more quickly than a stimulus that does not move. We
are more sensitive to objects that move in our field of vision, e.g. advertisers make use of this
fact and try to catch the attention of people through moving electric lights.

Duration and Degree of Attention:

People may possess the ability to grasp a number of objects or in other words, to attend a number
of stimuli in one short “presentation”. This ability of an individual is evaluated in terms of the
span of attention, which differs from person to person and even situation to situation.

The term “span of attention” is designed in terms of the quality, size extent to which the
perceptual field of an individual can be effectively organized in order to enable him to attain a
number of things in a given spell of short duration.

II. Internal or Subjective Factors: These factors predispose the individual to respond to
objective factors, to attend to those activities that fulfill his desires and motives and suit his
interest and attitude. It is the mental state of the perceiver. Some of the subjective factors are:
1. Interest:
Interest is said to be the mother of attention. We attend to objects in which we have interest. We
would like to watch a movie or a serial in TV because we are interested in the subject around
which the movie or serial revolves. In any get-together if any subject of our interest is discussed
that attracts our attention easily and makes us to participate in the discussion. In our day-to-day
life we pay attention to the stimulus we are interested in.

2. Motives:
Our basic needs and motives to a great extent, determine our attention, thirst, hunger, sex,
curiosity, fear are some of the important motives that influence attention, e.g. small children get
attracted towards eatables.

3. Mind set:
Person‟s readiness to respond determines his attention. If we are expecting a stimulus,
occurrence of that stimulus along with many other stimuli may not come in the way of attending
to that particular stimulus. At a time when students are expecting the examination time table by
the end of the semester the time table put out on the notice board along with other notices would
attract their attention easily.

4. Moods and attitudes:

What we attend to is influenced by the moods and attitudes. When we are disturbed or in angry
mood, we notice the smallest mistake of others very easily. Likewise our favourable and
unfavourable attitudes also determine our attention. After discussing subjective and objective
factors, we realize that these factors are interrelated. How much or in what way we attend to a
stimulus depends on subjective as well as objective factors.

THEORIES OF ATTENTION:

BROADBENT FILTER MODEL:

Donald Broadbent developed the filter model as an extension of William James‟ multi-storage
paradigm. Broadbent proposed the notion that a filter acts as a buffer on incoming sensory
information to select what information gains conscious awareness. The attended information will
pass through the filter, while unattended information will be completely blocked and ignored.
The filter acts on stimuli solely on their physical characteristics, such as location, loudness, and
pitch.
During World War II the rapid development of machinery did not arise without complications. It
was common for radar operators to have difficulties communicating with several pilots at once,
as all of their voices were broadcast over one loud speaker. This overloading of perceptual input
fueled Broadbent's curiosity of how stimuli capture our attention resources.
In the filter model, initial processing of stimuli occurs pre-attentively on the basis of their
physical features, and is housed in a temporary sensory store. Unlike the physical properties,
Broadbent believed semantic features, due to their complexity, would impose a limited capacity
on the temporary storehouse of incoming stimuli. For this reason, he postulated a filter then acts
on the stimuli, to determine what will be processed further and filter out irrelevant stimuli.
Information selected to pass through the filter is then available for short-term memory and
manipulation of the selected information, prior to storage in long-term memory.
The development of the filter model was the first theoretical account relating psychological
phenomena to information processing concepts of mathematics and computer science. As so,
Broadbent provided a computer metaphor in which information-processing at the micro level
acted in series, while at the macro level it operated in a parallel fashion. As attention can be
directed by physical properties or by an organism's drives, this reveals a parallel
processing manner at the macro level, while still processing information semantically at
a micro level. Further, goal-directed behavior requires attention to be controlled; hence a high
degree of selectivity is put forth in the information-processing stream. When developing his
model, Broadbent emphasized the splitting of incoming stimuli to attended or unattended
channels. Channel selection is guided through attention. If one is attempting to attend to a
stimulus based on their current goals, they will employ voluntary attention; whereas if a sensory
event catches one's attention, reflexive attention will be employed. During his experimentation,
Broadbent made use of the dichotic listening test. This task has been used extensively to test
numerous psychological phenomena such as response times of specific auditory information, as
well as testing for attended and unattended information presented to a participant. It is widely
used as it is a non-invasive method of testing cerebral dominance. In a typical dichotic listening
task, the participant is wearing a headphone, which will have differing stimuli presented in each
ear piece. The participant is instructed to attend (attended channel) the information coming from
one of the ear pieces and neglect (unattended channel) the information presented from the other.
Following the listening period, the participants are tested on whether they recall any information
presented in the unattended channel. Early research using dichotic listening tasks
provided empirical evidence of participants‟ ability to correctly recall information to the attended
channel, and poor recalling in the unattended channel. Caution must be taken when considering
the results of dichotomous listening tests as the majority of people have a right ear advantage for
verbal stimuli. This means that information presented to the right ear has a better chance of
gaining conscious awareness than information presented to the left ear.
Evaluation:

1. Broadbent's dichotic listening experiments have been criticized because:

The early studies all used people who were unfamiliar with shadowing and so found it
very difficult and demanding. Eysenck and Keane (1990) claim that the inability of
naive participants to shadow successfully is due to their unfamiliarity with the
shadowing task rather than an inability of the attention system. Participants reported
after the entire message had been played - it is possible that the unattended message is
analyzed thoroughly but participants forget. Analysis of the unattended message might
occur below the level of conscious awareness. For example, research by Von Wright et
al (1975) indicated analysis of the unattended message in a shadowing task. A word
was first presented to participants with a mild electric shock. When the same word was
later presented to the unattended channel, participants registered an increase in GSR
(indicative of emotional arousal and analysis of the word in the unattended channel).
More recent research has indicated the above points are important: e.g. Moray (1959)
studied the effects of practice. Naive subjects could only detect 8% of digits appearing
in either the shadowed or non-shadowed message; Moray (an experienced 'shadower')
detected 67%.
2. Broadbent's theory predicts that hearing your name when you are not paying attention
should be impossible because unattended messages are filtered out before you process
the meaning - thus the model cannot account for the 'Cocktail Party Phenomenon'.
3. Other researchers have demonstrated the 'cocktail party effect' (Cherry, 1953) under
experimental conditions and have discovered occasions when information heard in the
unattended ear 'broke through' to interfere with information participants are paying
attention to in the other ear.

TREISMAN‟S ATTENUATION THEORY

Treisman (1964) agrees with Broadbent's theory of an early bottleneck filter. However, the
difference is that Treisman's filter attenuates rather than eliminates the unattended material.
Attenuation is like turning down the volume so that if you have 4 sources of sound in one room
(TV, radio, people talking, baby crying) you can turn down or attenuate 3 in order to attend to
the fourth.
This means that people can still process the meaning of the attended message(s). In her
experiments, Treisman demonstrated that participants were still able to identify the contents of
an unattended message, indicating that they were able to process the meaning of both the
attended and unattended messages.
Treisman carried out dichotic listening tasks using the speech shadowing method. Typically, in
this method participants are asked to simultaneously repeat aloud speech played into one ear
(called the attended ear) whilst another message is spoken to the other ear.
For example, participants asked to shadow "I saw the girl furniture over" and ignore "me that
bird green jumping fee", reported hearing "I saw the girl jumping over"
Clearly, then, the unattended message was being processed for meaning and Broadbent's Filter
Model, where the filter extracted on the basis of physical characteristics only, could not explain
these findings. The evidence suggests that Broadbent's Filter Model is not adequate, it does not
allow for meaning being taken into account.

Evaluation :
1. Treisman's Model overcomes some of the problems associated with Broadbent's Filter
Model, e.g. the Attenuation Model can account for the 'Cocktail Party Syndrome'.
2. Treisman's model does not explain how exactly semantic analysis works.
3. The nature of the attenuation process has never been precisely specified.
4. A problem with all dichotic listening experiments is that you can never be sure that the
participants have not actually switched attention to the so called unattended channel.