attention, in psychology, the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of

other stimuli.
Attention is awareness of the here and now in a focal and perceptive way. For early psychologists,
such as Edward Bradford Titchener, attention determined the content of consciousness and
influenced the quality of conscious experience. In subsequent years less emphasis was placed on
the subjective element of consciousness and more on the behaviour patterns by which attention
could be recognized in others. Although human experience is determined by the way people direct
their attention, it is evident that they do not have complete control over such direction. There are, for
example, times when an individual has difficulty concentrating attention on a task, a conversation, or
a set of events. At other times an individuals attention is captured by an unexpected event rather
than voluntarily directed toward it.
Attention has to do with the immediate experience of the individual; it is a state of current
awareness. There are, of course, myriad events taking place in the world all the time, each
impinging upon a persons senses. There are also events taking place within the body that affect
attention, just as there are ..
Selective attention[edit]


Visual attention[edit]
In cognitive psychology there are at least two models which describe how visual attention operates.
These models may be considered loosely as metaphors which are used to describe internal
processes and to generate hypotheses that are falsifiable. Generally speaking, visual attention is
thought to operate as a two-stage process.
[6]
In the first stage, attention is distributed uniformly over
the external visual scene and processing of information is performed in parallel. In the second stage,
attention is concentrated to a specific area of the visual scene (i.e. it is focused), and processing is
performed in a serial fashion.
The first of these models to appear in the literature is the spotlight model. The term "spotlight" was
inspired by the work of William James who described attention as having a focus, a margin, and a
fringe.
[7]
The focus is an area that extracts information from the visual scene with a high-resolution,
the geometric center of which being where visual attention is directed. Surrounding the focus is the
fringe of attention which extracts information in a much more crude fashion (i.e. low-resolution). This
fringe extends out to a specified area and this cut-off is called the margin.
The second model that is called the zoom-lens model, and was first introduced in 1986.
[8]
This model
inherits all properties of the spotlight model (i.e. the focus, the fringe, and the margin) but has the
added property of changing in size. This size-change mechanism was inspired by the zoom lens you
might find on a camera, and any change in size can be described by a trade-off in the efficiency of
processing.
[9]
The zoom-lens of attention can be described in terms of an inverse trade-off between
the size of focus and the efficiency of processing: because attentional resources are assumed to be
fixed, then it follows that the larger the focus is, the slower processing will be of that region of the
visual scene since this fixed resource will be distributed over a larger area. It is thought that the
focus of attention can subtend a minimum of 1 of visual angle,
[7][10]
however the maximum size has
not yet been determined.

Selective auditory attention or selective hearing is a type of selective attention and involves
the auditory system of the nervous system. Selective hearing does not involve the sounds that are
not heard. However, it is characterized as the action in which people focus their attention on a
specific source of a sound or spoken words. The sounds and noise in the surrounding environment
is heard by the auditory system but certain parts of the auditory information are processed in the
brain only. Most often, auditory attention is directed at things people would like to hear. The
increased instances of selective hearing can be seen in family homes. A common example would be
a mother asking her child to do something before he or she can enjoy a reward. Mother may say:
James, you can have an ice-cream after you clean your room. And James replies: Thanks mom! I
needed that ice-cream. Selective hearing is not a physiological disorder but rather it is the capability
of humans to block out sounds and noise. It is the notion of ignoring certain things in the surrounding
environment. Over the years, there has been increased research in the selectivity of auditory
attention, namely selective hearing.
Through observations, one would realize that it is the reward that is heard almost all the time. The
mind does not process the auditory information about the chore. It is basically the filtration of positive
pleasant information. If the child was not physically impaired in hearing, he would have heard the
whole sentence being said. It has puzzled parents, as well as psychologists, the way the childs mind
can selectively hear the things that they want to hear and leave out unpleasant tasks.

Multitasking and divided attention[edit]
See also: Human multitasking, distracted driving
Multitasking can be defined as the attempt to perform two or more tasks simultaneously;
however, research shows that when multitasking, people make more mistakes or perform their
tasks more slowly.
[11]
Attention must be divided among all of the component tasks to perform
them.
Older research involved looking at the limits of people performing simultaneous tasks like
reading stories, while listening and writing something else,
[12]
or listening to two separate
messages through different ears (i.e., dichotic listening). Generally, classical research into
attention investigated the ability of people to learn new information when there were multiple
tasks to be performed, or to probe the limits of our perception (c.f. Donald Broadbent). There is
also older literature on people's performance on multiple tasks performed simultaneously, such
as driving a car while tuning a radio
[13]
or driving while telephoning.
[14]

The vast majority of current research on human multitasking is based on performance of doing
two tasks simultaneously,
[11]
usually that involves driving while performing another task, such as
texting, eating, or even speaking to passengers in the vehicle, or with a friend over a cellphone.
This research reveals that the human attentional system has limits for what it can process:
driving performance is worse while engaged in other tasks; drivers make more mistakes, brake
harder and later, get into more accidents, veer into other lanes, and/or are less aware of their
surroundings when engaged in the previously discussed tasks.
[15][16][17]

There has been little difference found between speaking on a hands-free cell phone or a hand-
held cell phone,
[18][19]
which suggests that it is the strain of attentional system that causes
problems, rather than what the driver is doing with his or her hands. While speaking with a
passenger is as cognitively demanding as speaking with a friend over the phone,
[20]
passengers
are able to change the conversation based upon the needs of the driver. For example, if traffic
intensifies, a passenger may stop talking to allow the driver to navigate the increasingly difficult
roadway; a conversation partner over a phone would not be aware of the change in
environment.
There have been multiple theories regarding divided attention. One, conceived
by Kahneman,
[21]
explains that there is a single pool of attentional resources that can be freely
divided among multiple tasks. This model seems to be too oversimplified, however, due to the
different modalities (e.g., visual, auditory, verbal) that are perceived.
[22]
When the two
simultaneous tasks use the same modality, such as listening to a radio station and writing a
paper, it is much more difficult to concentrate on both because the tasks are likely to interfere
with each other. The specific modality model was theorized by Navon and Gopher in 1979.
Although this model is more adequate at explaining divided attention among simple tasks,
resource theory is another, more accurate metaphor for explaining divided attention on complex
tasks. Resource theory states that as each complex task is automatized, performing that task
requires less of the individual's limited-capacity attentional resources.
[22]

Other variables play a part in our ability to pay attention to and concentrate on many tasks at
once. These include, but are not limited to, anxiety, arousal, task difficulty, and skills.
[22]



Sustained attention is a directed focus on a stimulus for the duration of a cognitive task. Distractions
can break a persons attention and make it difficult to complete the task in a timely or effective
fashion. These can include environmental as well as cognitive disruptions; certain learning
disabilities, for example, interfere with attention. Patients with conditions like
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) have difficulty with sustained attention tasks.
There are three general stages to sustained attention. The first involves attracting notice to direct a
persons focus onto a particular stimulus. Someone sifting through the newspaper in the morning, for
example, might notice an article that looks interesting. This initiates the task of reading the article,
which requires holding the attention on the text as the person reads through it. Finally, release
allows someone to move on to another task.
Some tasks lend themselves well to split or interrupted attention, allowing people to work on multiple
things at once. Someone can watch television and knit, for example. Others require sustained
attention; it is harder to read while watching children, or to drive a car while shaving. People who
have difficulty with sustained attention tasks may have trouble with the initiation process or with
holding their attention long enough to finish.
Studies on sustained attention evaluate the parts of the brain involved and the differences between
developing and adult brains, as well as the brains of people with various cognitive disabilities. This
research can help scientists understand how attention works, and how people can address deficits
that make it hard for them to focus on stimuli. People can also have a problem with releasing or
breaking attention when they are finished, a phenomenon seen in some patients
with autism spectrum disorders and similar conditions. These patients become hyper focused on a
task or subject and can become distressed if someone attempts to interrupt or redirect their attention








Home Perspectives Cognitive Selective Attention
Selective Attention
by Saul McLeod published 2008
A bottleneck restricts the rate of flow, as, say, in the narrow neck of a milk bottle.
The narrower the bottleneck, the lower the rate of flow.
Broadbent's, Treisman's, and Deutsch and Deutsch Models of Attention are all
bottleneck models because they predict we cannot consciously attend to all of our
sensory input at the same time.
This limited capacity for paying attention is therefore a bottleneck and the models
each try to explain how the material that passes through the bottleneck is selected.
Broadbent's Filter Model
Donald Broadbent is recognized as one of the major contributors to the information
processing approach, which started with his work with air traffic controllers during
the war. In that situation a number of competing messages from departing and
incoming aircraft are arriving continuously, all requiring attention. The air traffic
controller finds s/he can deal effectively with only one message at a time and so has to
decide which is the most important. Broadbent designed an experiment (dichotic
listening) to investigate the processes involved in switching attention which are
presumed to be going on internal in our heads.
Broadbent (1958) argued that information from all of the stimuli presented at any
given time enters a sensory buffer. One of the inputs is then selected on the basis of its
physical characteristics for further processing by being allowed to pass through a
filter. 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, and
if they are not processed they decay rapidly. Broadbent assumed that the filter
rejected the non-shadowed or unattended message at an early stage of processing.
Broadbent wanted to see how people were able to focus their attention (selectively
attend), and to do this he deliberately overloaded them with stimuli - they had too
many signals, too much information to process at the same time.
One of the ways Broadbent achieved this was by simultaneously sending one message
(a 3-digit number) to a person's right ear and a different message (a different 3-digit
number) to their left ear. Participants were asked to listen to both messages at the
same time and repeat what they heard. This is known as a 'dichotic listening task'.

Broadbent was interested in how these would be repeated back. Would the participant
repeat the digits back in the order that they were heard (order of presentation), or
repeat back what was heard in one ear followed by the other ear (ear-by-ear). He
actually found that people made fewer mistakes repeating back ear by ear and would
usually repeat back this way.
Results from this research led Broadbent to produce his 'filter' model of how selective
attention operates. Broadbent concluded that we can pay attention to only one
channel at a time - so his is a single channel model.
In the dichotic listening task each ear is a channel. We can listen either to the right ear
(that's one channel) or the left ear (that's another channel). Broadbent also discovered
that it is difficult to switch channels more than twice a second. So you can only pay
attention to the message in one ear at a time - the message in the other ear is lost,
though you may be able to repeat back a few items from the unattended ear. This
could be explained by the short-term memory store which holds onto information in
the unattended ear for a short time.
Broadbent thought that the filter, which selects one channel for attention, does this
only on the basis of PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS of the information coming in:
for example, which particular ear the information was coming to, or the type of voice.
According to Broadbent the meaning of any of the messages is not taken into account
at all by the filter. All SEMANTIC PROCESSING (processing the information to
decode the meaning, in other words understand what is said) is carried out after the
filter has selected the channel to pay attention to. So whatever message is sent to the
unattended ear is not understood.

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
non-shadowed or unattended message at an early stage of processing.
Evaluation of Broadbent's Model
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 & 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 attentional 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. This implies some analysis of meaning of stimuli must
have occurred prior to the selection of channels. In Broadbent's model the filter is
based solely on sensory analysis of the physical characteristics of the stimuli.
Treisman's Attenuation Model
Selective attention requires that stimuli are filtered so that attention is directed.
Broadbent's model suggests that the selection of material to attend to (that is, the
filtering) is made early, before semantic analysis.
Treisman's (1964) model retains this early filter which works on physical features of
the message only. The crucial difference is that Treisman's filter ATTENUATESrather
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.
The result is almost the same as turning them off, the unattended material appears lost.
But, if a non-attended channel includes your name, for example, there is a chance you
will hear it because the material is still there.

Treisman agreed with Broadbent that there was a bottleneck, but disagreed with the
location. Treisman carried out experiments 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.
In one shadowing experiment, identical messages were presented to two ears but with
a slight delay between them. If this delay was too long, then participants did not
notice that the same material was played to both ears. When the unattended message
was ahead of the shadowed message by up to 2 seconds, participants noticed the
similarity. If it is assumed the unattended material is held in a temporary buffer store,
then these results would indicate that the duration of material held in sensory buffer
store is about 2 seconds.
In an experiment with bilingual participants, Treisman presented the attended message
in English and the unattended message in a French translation. When the French
version lagged only slightly behind the English version, participants could report that
both messages had the same meaning. 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.
Treisman's ATTENUATION THEORY, in which the unattended message is processed
less thoroughly than the attended one, suggests processing of the unattended message
is attenuated or reduced to a greater or lesser extent depending on the demands on the
limited capacity processing system.
Treisman suggested messages are processed in a systematic way, beginning with
analysis of physical characteristics, syllabic pattern, and individual words. After that,
grammatical structure and meaning are processed. It will often happen that there is
insufficient processing capacity to permit a full analysis of unattended stimuli. In that
case, later analyses will be omitted. This theory neatly predicts that it will usually be
the physical characteristics of unattended inputs which are remembered rather than
their meaning.
To be analyzed, items have to reach a certain threshold of intensity All the
attended/selected material will reach this threshold but only some of the attenuated
items. Some items will retain a permanently reduced threshold, for example your own
name or words/phrases like 'help' and 'fire'. Other items will have a reduced threshold
at a particular moment if they have some relevance to the main attended message.
Evaluation of Treisman's Attenuation Model
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.

he Stroop effect is a phenomenon which can show how the brain processes words and colors
differently. Discovered by John Ridley Stoop in the 1930s, this effect is typically triggered by printing
words that express a different color than they actually are. If the word green is printed in blue, for
example, most people will read what the word says, while it is usually more difficult to read out the
colors of the text instead. Different tests for the Stroop effect can involve words that have one letter
that is different in color, words that do not have meaning, or that identify emotions. Research using
Stroop experiments has shown that most people identify words quicker than colors.
A basic test of the Stroop effect includes a list words that say what color they are, while a second list
includes words printed in a different color than what they mean. Readers are typically asked to say
the color instead of the meaning of the word. Another variety of the Stroop effect is to use shapes
outlined in different colors. Usually, people identify the colors and shapes regardless, in contrast to
the general difficulty of reading what color a word is. The Stroop effect, however, can be reduced
and even eliminated by changing the color of just one letter.
Slowed brain processing can also be tested by manipulating words in other ways. Some Stroop
effect tests rotate words, or arrange the letters in a clockwise or counterclockwise pattern. These
can provide insight into whether the brain processes the word patterns or the colors faster, and
some varieties of the test even reverse letters or scramble them altogether.
Researchers often test brain processing using multiple tasks. Up to 150 items may be used in a
clinical test; scores can be derived by counting how many of these are read during a specific period
of time. Sometimes tests are scored based on the amount of time it takes to complete each sub-
task, while other versions focus more on counting ones mistakes.
The Stroop effect is often used to gauge brain development in school children. Higher levels of
interference are often present in conditions such as brain damage, dementia, or Attention-
Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The effect can also be used to determine the severity of these
problems, as well as schizophrenia, addictions, and other common mental disorders. Many
experiments, however, are used to demonstrate brain function as part of a school science fair, while
interactive online tests, in different variations, can be taken and scored automatically.









Original experiment[edit]
Stimulus 1: Purple Brown Red Blue Green

Stimulus 2: Brown Red Blue Green

Stimulus 3:

Examples of the three stimuli and colors used for each of the activities of the original Stroop article.
[1]



Figure 1 from Experiment 2 of the original description of the Stroop Effect (1935). 1 is the time that it takes to name
the color of the dots while 2 is the time that it takes to say the color when there is a conflict with the written word.
[1]

The effect is named after John Ridley Stroop, who published the effect in English in 1935 in an
article entitled "Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions" that includes three different
experiments.
[1]
However, the effect was first published in 1929 in Germany, and its roots can be
followed back to works of James McKeen Cattell and Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt in the nineteenth
century.
[2][3][4]

In his experiments, Stroop administered several variations of the same test for which three different
kinds of stimuli were created. In the first one, names of colors appeared in black ink. In the second,
names of colors appeared in a different ink than the color named. Finally in the third one, there were
squares of a given color.
[1]

In the first experiment, 1 and 2 were used (see first figure). The task required the participants to read
the written color names of the words independently of the color of the ink (for example, they would
have to read "purple" no matter what the color of its ink was). In the second experiment, stimulus 2
and 3 were used, and participants were required to say the color of the letters independently of the
written word with the second kind of stimulus and also name the color of the dot squares. If the word
"purple" was written in red, they would have to say "red", but not "purple"; when the squares were
shown, the participant would have to say its color. Stroop, in the third experiment, tested his
participants at different stages of practice at the tasks and stimulus used in the first and second
experiments, to account for the effects of association.
[1]

Stroop noted that participants took much longer to complete the color reading in the second task
than they had taken to name the colors of the squares in Experiment 2. This delay had not appeared
in the first experiment. Such interference was explained by the automation of reading, where the
mind automatically determines the semantic meaning of the word (it reads the word "red" and thinks
of the color "red"), and then must intentionally check itself and identify instead the color of the word
(the ink is a color other than red), a process that is not automatized.
[1]

Unlike researchers performing the Stroop test that is most commonly used in psychological
evaluation,
[5]
J.R Stroop never compares the time used for reading black words and the time needed
for naming colors that conflicted with the written word.
Experimental findings[edit]
Stimuli in Stroop paradigms can be divided into 3 groups: neutral, congruent and incongruent.
Neutral stimuli are those stimuli in which only the text (similarly to stimuli 1 of Stroop's experiment),
or color (similarly to stimuli 3 of Stroop's experiment) are displayed.
[6]
Congruent stimuli are those in
which the ink color and the word refer to the same color (for example the "pink" word written in pink).
Incongruent stimuli are those in which ink color and word differ.
[6]
Three experimental findings are
recurrently found in Stroop experiments.
[6]
A first finding is semantic interference, which states that
naming the ink color of neutral stimuli (e.g. when the ink color and word do not interfere with each
other) is faster than in incongruent conditions. It is called semantic interference since it is usually
accepted that the relationship in meaning between ink color and word is at the root of the
interference.
[6]
The second finding, semantic facilitation, explains the finding that naming the ink of
congruent stimuli is faster (e.g. when the ink color and the word match) than when neutral stimuli are
present (e.g. when the ink is black, but the word describes a color). The third finding is that both
semantic interference and facilitation disappear when the task consists of reading the word instead
of naming the ink. It has been sometimes called Stroop asynchrony, and has been explained by a
reduced automatization when naming colors compared to reading words.
[6]

In the study of interference theory, the most commonly used procedure has been similar to Stroop's
second experiment, in which subjects were tested on naming colors of incompatible words and of
control patches. The first experiment in Stroop's study (reading words in black versus incongruent
colors) has been discussed less. In both cases, the interference score is expressed as the difference
between the times needed to read each of the two types of cards.
[4]
Instead of naming stimuli,
subjects have also been asked to sort stimuli into categories.
[4]
Different characteristics of the
stimulus such as ink colors or direction of words have also been systematically varied.
[4]
None of all
these modifications eliminates the effect of interference.
[4]