Attention Definition

Have you ever wonder why in some critical situations such as during exams we seem not to remember important informations we want. Have you asked yourself how come when you are talking to someone and another person standing somewhere mentions your name, you immediately become alert and listen attentively to what you heard? Also have you tried to understand how come in noisy place such as the football stadium you can still focus intensely on the players on the field. To understand these situations, a lot of things have to be considered.

Individuals focus on particular event(s) at any given point in time. This focus requires a lot of mental effort or concentration and this is what cognitive psychologist term attention. Attention refers to the concentration and focusing of mental effort (Best, 1995). Focus is selective, divisible and shiftable. Focus is selective when we pay attention to some things and not others. It is shifable when we are able to move our attention from one thing to another and focus is divisible when we can attend to two or more activities
at a time. Focusing on two activities at a time is called dual task. Dual tasks performance can be carried out either in the same modality (within modality dual tasks) or with different modalities (dual tasks across modalities). For us to be able to focus on an activity we must first consider our cognitive resources and the nature of the activity we are performing that is how difficult or easy it is.

Based on many researches by cognitive psychologists, we know our cognitive resources are limited, that is, we can only focus on a few things at a time.
Considering the nature of activity, if it is difficult to perform then a lot of cognitive effort will be required and vice versa. According to Broadbent (1958), the amount of information that can be attended to at anytime is limited, if the amount exceeds our cognitive resources capacity, an attention filter is brought in that allow some information in whereas the rest are blocked. Thus, we make little meaning out of blocked information. This filter saves us from information overload when there is too much information to process. Treisman (1960) also explained this using the attenuation theory of attention. This theory postulates that the volume of the unattended information is turned down and we can make meaning out of them because they might still be
available.

Bookbinder and Osman (2009) study on dual task effect among a sample of males and females indicated that participants performed significantly better in single task compared to dual task. The performance of males and females did not significantly differ from each other in both single and dual tasks. Another comprehensive study by Belardinelli and Macaluso (2009) found that the limitation associated with dual tasks performance is intense among within modality dual tasks group compared to across modality dual tasks group emphasizing that within modality share the same resources that leading to cognitive overload or resource limitation whilst across modality dual tasks use resources from different modalities.

Driver (1999) also found that participants in the within auditory dual tasks performed poorly compared to participants in across visual and auditory modality. He explained that auditory attention shift in the direction of an upcoming visual stimuli when they are presented together thus devoting the entire resources to the visual stimulus making it easier to recall visual stimuli. Greene, Sasine and Baylis (2002) found high performance in single tasks among males than females and low performance of males compared to females in dual tasks. Roland (2002) was with a different opinion when no sex differences were observed between males and females in dual task performance and single tasks performance. Sarri (2006) supported the study of Roland (2002) by asserting that the demand of the dual tasks affects both men and women equally leading to equal performance unless that task is traditionally feminine or masculine.