Attention

1. Exogenous: External.

2. Exdogenous: Internal/ intention.

1. Selective Attention

1. • Selective attention is the process of directing our awareness to relevant stimuli while ignoring irrelevant stimuli in the environment.

   • This is an important process as there is a limit to how much information can be processed at a given time, and selective attention allows us to tune out insignificant details and focus on what is important.

   • This limited capacity for paying attention has been conceptualized as a bottleneck, which restricts the flow of information.  The narrower the bottleneck, the lower the rate of flow.

• Because we have only a limited capacity to process information, this filter is designed to prevent the information-processing system from becoming overloaded. 

• The inputs not initially selected by the filter remain briefly in the sensory buffer store, and if they are not processed they decay rapidly.  Broadbent assumed that the filter rejected the unattended message at an early stage of processing.

• According to Broadbent the meaning of any of the messages is not taken into account at all by the filter.  All semantic processing is carried out after the filter has selected the message to pay attention to. So whichever message(s) restricted by the bottleneck (i.e. not selective) is not understood

• 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.

1. • Multitasking and divided attention

   • Spotlight model

   • Three factors seem to influence multi-tasking.

     1. Task similarity. writing and interviewing => verbal processing

     2. Task difficulty

     3. Practice