DEBRE BIREHA UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF COMPUTING

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

COURSE TITLE: HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION (HCI)

COURSE CODE: COSE 3122

INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT

Prepared By

Name: Demelash Beshwured

ID : DBUR/1280/09

Submitted to: Zelalem.G

Submitted date:23/03/2019
Contents
What is attention?........................................................................................................................................1
IS attention is selective ? yes.......................................................................................................................3
How Does Selective Attention Work?.....................................................................................................3
 What is attention?
Selecting things to concentrate on from the mass around us, at a point in time  from the range
of possibilities available.

Focussed and divided attention enables us to be selective in terms of the mass of competing
stimuli but limits our ability to keep track of all events.

Information at the interface should be structured to capture users’ attention,

e.g. use perceptual boundaries (windows), colour, reverse video, sound and flashing lights.

Attention involves our auditory and/or visual senses an example of auditory attention
is waiting in the dentist's waiting room for our name to be called out to know when 

it is our time to go in. auditory attention is based on pitch, timber and intensity. An

example of attention involving the visual senses in scanning the football results in a newspaper
to attend to information about how our team has done.

Visual attention is based on color and location.

Models of Attention

There are two models of attention namely focused attention and Divided attention.

Focused attention

Our ability to attend to one event from what amounts to a mass of competing stimuli

in the environment have been psychologically termed as focused attention. The

streams of information we choose to attend to will tend to be relevant to the activities

and intentions that we have at that time. For example, when engaged in a conversation

it is usual to attend to what the other person is saying. If something catches our eye in

the periphery to our vision, for example, another person we want to talk to suddenly

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appear, we may divert our attention to what she is doing. We may then get distracted

from the conversation we are having and as a consequence have to ask the person we

are conversing with to repeat themselves.on the other hand, we may be skilled at carrying
on the conversation while intermittently observing what the person we want to talk to is doing

Divided attention

As we said, we may be skilled at carrying on the conversation while intermittently

observing what the person we want to talk to is doing. When we attempt to attend to

mire than one thing at a time it is called divided attention.

Another example that is often used to illustrate this attentional phenomenon is being

able to drive while holding a conversation with a passenger.

Voluntary attention

A further property of attention is that can be voluntary, as when we make a conscious

effort to change our attention.

Involuntary attention

Attention may also be involuntary, as when the salient characteristics of the

competing stimuli grab our attention. An everyday example of an involuntary act is

being distracted from working when we can hear music or voices in the next room.

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 IS attention is selective ? yes
Selective attention is simply the act of focusing on a particular object for a period of time while
simultaneously ignoring irrelevant information that is also occurring. This occurs on a daily basis
and can be seen in basically any of your interactions. Because it is impossible to give attention to
every stimulus in our environment, we use selective attention to select what stimuli are important
as events occur.

The degree of selective attention one can apply to a situation varies depending on the person and
their ability to focus or concentrate; it's also affected by distractions in the environment.
Selective attention may be a conscious effort, but it can occur subconsciously as well

How Does Selective Attention Work?

At any given moment, we are subjected to a constant barrage of sensory information. The blare
of a car horn from the street outside, the chatter of your friends, the click of the keys as you type
a paper for school, the hum of the heater as it keeps your room warm on a brisk autumn day. But
in most cases, we don't pay attention to each and every one of these sensory experiences. Instead,
we center our attention on certain important elements of our environment while other things
blend into the background or pass us by completely unnoticed.

So how exactly do we decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore?

Imagine that you are at a party for a friend hosted at a bustling restaurant. Multiple
conversations, the clinking of plates and forks, and many other sounds compete for your
attention. Out of all these noises, you find yourself able to tune out the irrelevant sounds and
focus on the amusing story that your dinner partner shares.

How do you manage to ignore certain stimuli and concentrate on just one aspect of your
environment? This is an example of selective attention. Because our ability to attend to the things
around us is limited in terms of both capacity and duration, we have to be picky about the things
we pay attention to. Attention acts somewhat like a spotlight, highlighting the details that we
need to focus on and casting irrelevant information to the sidelines of our perception.

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"In order to sustain our attention to one event in everyday life, we must filter out other events,"
explains author Russell Revlin in his text Cognition: Theory and Practice. "We must be selective
in our attention by focusing on some events to the detriment of others. This is because attention
is a resource that needs to be distributed to those events that are important."

Selective Visual Attention

There are two major models describing how visual attention works.

The "spotlight" model works much like it sounds—it proposes that visual attention works similar
to that of a spotlight. Psychologist William James suggested that this spotlight includes a focal
point in which things are viewed clearly. The area surrounding this focal point, known as the
fringe, is still visible, but not clearly seen. Finally, the area outside of the fringe area of the
spotlight is known as the margin.

The second approach is known as the "zoom-lens" model. While it contains all the same
elements of the spotlight model, it also suggests that we are able to increase or decrease the size
of our focus much like the zoom lens of a camera. However, a larger focus area also results in
slower-processing since it includes more information so the limited attentional resources must be
distributed over a larger area.

Selective Auditory Attention

Some of the best-known experiments on auditory attention are those performed by psychologist
Colin Cherry. Cherry investigated how people are able to track certain conversations while
tuning others out, a phenomenon he referred to as the "cocktail party" effect.

In these experiments, two auditory messages were presented simultaneously with one presented
to each ear. Cherry then asked participants to pay attention to a particular message, and then
repeat back what they had heard. He discovered that the participants were able to easily pay
attention to one message and repeat it, but when they were asked about the contents of the other
message, they were unable to say anything about it. Cherry found that when contents of the
unattended message were suddenly switched (such as changing from English to German mid-
message or suddenly playing backward) very few of the participants even noticed.

Theories of Selective Attention

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Theories of selective attention tend to focus on when stimulus information is attended to, either
early in the process or late.

Broadbent's Filter Model

One of the earliest theories of attention was Donald Broadbent's filter model. Building on the
research conducted by Cherry, Broadbent used an information-processing metaphor to describe
human attention. He suggested that our capacity to process information is limited in terms of
capacity, and our selection of information to process takes place early on in the perceptual
process.

In order to do this, we utilize a filter to determine which information to attend to. All stimuli are
first processed based upon physical properties that include color, loudness, direction, and pitch.
Our selective filters then allow for certain stimuli to pass through for further processing while
other stimuli are rejected.

Treisman's Attenuation Theory

Treisman suggested that while Broadbent's basic approach was correct, it failed to account for
the fact that people can still process the meaning of attended messages. Treisman proposed that
instead of a filter, attention works by utilizing an attenuator that identifies a stimulus based on
physical properties or by meaning.

Think of the attenuator like a volume control—you can turn down the volume of other sources of
information in order to attend to a single source of information. The "volume" or intensity of
those other stimuli might be low, but they are still present.

In 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

Memory Selection Models

Other researchers also believed that Broadbent's model was insufficient and that attention was
not based solely on a stimulus's physical properties. The cocktail party effect serves as a prime
example. Imagine that you are at a party and paying attention to the conversation among your

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group of friends. Suddenly, you hear your name mentioned by a group of people nearby. Even
though you were not attending to that conversation, a previously unattended stimulus
immediately grabbed your attention based on meaning rather than physical properties.

According to the memory selection theory of attention, both attended and unattended messages
pass through the initial filter and are then sorted at a second-stage based upon the actual meaning
of the message's contents. Information that we attend to based upon meaning is then passed
into short-term memory

Resource Theories of Selective Attention

More recent theories tend to focus on the idea of attention being a limited resource and how
those resources are divvied up among competing sources of information. Such theories propose
that we have a fixed amount of attention available and that we must then choose how we allocate
our available attentional reserves among multiple tasks or events.

"Attentional-resources theory has been criticized severely as overly broad and vague. Indeed, it
may not stand alone in explaining all aspects of attention, but it complements filter theories quite
well," suggests Robert Sternberg in his text, "Cognitive Psychology," in summarizing the
different theories of selective attention. "Filter and bottleneck theories of attention seem to be
more suitable metaphors for competing tasks that appear to be attentionally incompatible...
Resource theory seems to be a better metaphor for explaining phenomena of divided attention on
complex tasks."

Observations

A number of factors can influence selective attention in spoken messages. The location from
where the sound originates can play a role. For example, you are probably more likely to pay
attention to a conversation taking place right next to you rather than one several feet away.

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In his text, "The Psychology of Attention," psychology professor Harold Pashler notes that
simply presenting messages to different ears will not lead to the selection of one message over
the other. The two messages must have some sort of non-overlap in time in order for one to be
selectively attended to over the other. As mentioned previously, changes in pitch can also play a
role in selectivity.

The number of auditory selections that must be tuned out in order to attend to just one can make
the process more difficult. Imagine that you are in a crowded room and many different
conversations are taking place all around you. Selectively attending to just one of those auditory
signals can be very difficult, even if the conversation is taking place nearby.

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