Essay On Selective Attention
Selective Attention
In the world we live in, we are bombarded by infinite sensory inputs. The hum of the heater; the ticking on the clock; the chatter of your friends. Yet, this information usually goes unnoticed. Our brain has limited space to process and retain information and is not capable of processing everything we hear or see around us. In order to prevent a mental breakdown, we filter out the information we want and ignore the rest, referring to selective attention.
Selective attention focuses our attention on certain important elements of our environment while other things blend into the background or pass us by completely disregarded. People utilize cognitive processes to focus on relevant sources on action, input or thoughts while …show more content…
She used the speech shadowing method. Through switching the given stimuli from ear to ear, her experiment demonstrates how we can pay attention to information from both ears and not just one ear. Instead of a filter, Treisman claims that an attenuator is responsible for identifying stimulus based on physical properties or by meaning. We do not completely factor out information we receive from one channel, rather the attenuator lowers the volume of other sources of information in order to attend to a single source of information. After inputs reach the attenuator, grammatical structure and meaning are processed. The inputs will be omitted when the unattended ear can not process a full analysis of the given information, meaning that we often only remember physical characteristics like the sound of someone’s voice rather than the actual meaning of the words. This theory successfully accounts for the cocktail party syndrome and poses less problems than the Broadbent theory.
The cocktail effect is the idea that we are placed in a party-like setting with an abundance of people and we filter out one conversation amongst a room of constant chattering. Additionally, our attention springs into excitement and interest when we hear our own name. hear your name being said in a conversation whether it’s in your ear or across the
In the world we live in, we are bombarded by infinite sensory inputs. The hum of the heater; the ticking on the clock; the chatter of your friends. Yet, this information usually goes unnoticed. Our brain has limited space to process and retain information and is not capable of processing everything we hear or see around us. In order to prevent a mental breakdown, we filter out the information we want and ignore the rest, referring to selective attention.
Selective attention focuses our attention on certain important elements of our environment while other things blend into the background or pass us by completely disregarded. People utilize cognitive processes to focus on relevant sources on action, input or thoughts while …show more content…
She used the speech shadowing method. Through switching the given stimuli from ear to ear, her experiment demonstrates how we can pay attention to information from both ears and not just one ear. Instead of a filter, Treisman claims that an attenuator is responsible for identifying stimulus based on physical properties or by meaning. We do not completely factor out information we receive from one channel, rather the attenuator lowers the volume of other sources of information in order to attend to a single source of information. After inputs reach the attenuator, grammatical structure and meaning are processed. The inputs will be omitted when the unattended ear can not process a full analysis of the given information, meaning that we often only remember physical characteristics like the sound of someone’s voice rather than the actual meaning of the words. This theory successfully accounts for the cocktail party syndrome and poses less problems than the Broadbent theory.
The cocktail effect is the idea that we are placed in a party-like setting with an abundance of people and we filter out one conversation amongst a room of constant chattering. Additionally, our attention springs into excitement and interest when we hear our own name. hear your name being said in a conversation whether it’s in your ear or across the