Attention is the ability to actively process specific information in the environment while tuning

out other details. Attention is limited in terms of both capacity and duration, so it is important
to have ways to effectively manage the attentional resources we have available in order to make
sense of the world. Attention and perception are considered to be twin psychological processes,
independent of each other yet closely related while functioning. It is considered as a process
which bridges the gap between sensation and perception. When the sense organs sense and
record a stimulus, it has to enter the channel of attention in order to be perceived. Thus, it is
attention which determines perception to a great extent, like the proverbial priest who delivers
the boon, though it is granted by God. Attention begins with a process of selection and
elimination.

One of the oldest psychological issues is that of attention. Aristotle considered focus as a
limitation of the senses in his early Greek models of attention. The ability of a subject to
monitor one sensory object while ignoring others was examined by philosophers Christian
Wolff and Dugald Stewart in the 18th century. Wilhelm Wundt, an experimental psychologist,
used introspection to study the direction and content of his thoughts. By focusing attention,
Sigmund Freud distinguished between attended or conscious thought and inaccessible mental
processes.

Factors affecting attention:

What commands our attention is determined by a number of factors. Most of the factors can be
broadly divided into two types i.e., objective factors and subjective factors.

Objective factors:

1. intensity: objects which provide strong stimulation to our sense organs like an exceptionally
loud noise or bright light.

2. size: objects that are unusually huge or large.

3. movement: objects that has unusual movements or such.

4. distinctness: objects that stand out from its surroundings.

5. repetition: anything which is repeated continuously also stand among other stimuli.

6. change: a sudden alteration in the stimulus.

Subjective factors:
It is also known as personal factors.

1. Need: ex- a person who has just finished a big meal may not be attracted by the smell of the
food which is placed in the room as strongly as a person who is starving.

2. motive: ex- a person waiting for a letter will hear the postman’s call immediately inspite of
traffic noise etc,

3. interest: ex- one may notice the score of a cricket match from a radio commentary while
others continue their conversation without even noticing.

It can be said that attention is not a simple process but is influenced by other processes
like learning, motivation, past experiences etc.

Shifting of attention:

The intensity of attention to a certain stimulus is also affected by the presence of other stimuli
competing for your attention. This is referred to as shifting of attention. This means a person’s
attention, though focussed on something, usually moves to other things in one’s environment.
Not only does attention shift briefly from major activities to peripheral events and back again,
but it has been demonstrated scientifically that quick shifting of sttention from stimulus to
stimulus is necessary for perception.

Distraction of attention:

Distraction is the act of diverting one's or a group's attention away from the selected focus of
attention and toward the source of distraction. Distraction can be caused by a lack of ability to
pay attention, a lack of interest in the object of attention, a higher interest in something other
than the object of attention, or the source of distraction's considerable intensity, novelty, or
attractiveness.

Theories of attention:

Selective attention theories:

Broadbent is credited with developing the first model of attention, which is sometimes referred
to as the "bottleneck hypothesis" since information had to be filtered to keep the flow at a
tolerable level (Anderson et al., 2002). Broadbent's key study on selective attention, published
in 1958, not only paved the way for subsequent research, but also developed a cognitive
approach to psychology.
 To test the notion that people have an internal, conscious selection or filtering technique
that directs attention to certain stimuli over others, Broadbent used dichotic listening studies
(in which volunteers heard separate auditory tracks in each ear). His filter theory was a serial
processing "early-selection" approach, in which filtering took place early in the information
processing process based on physical attributes like pitch or loudness. Attention is directed to
information that goes through the filter or to salient information that causes a shift in attention
limited by single channel processing in the bottleneck model.

Treisman extended Broadbent's concept to what is now known as attenuation theory in

the 1960s. Her findings called into question the idea of a mainly early-selection model.
Treisman's subjects also used the dichotic listening strategy, repeating out loud (shadowing) a
narrative heard in one ear while disregarding a second narrative heard in the other. Treisman
noticed that respondents' attention shifted ears unintentionally on occasion. As a result,
according to Treisman, humans do not entirely filter out all unattended information; rather, we
attenuate certain information depending on both physical and semantic selection criteria.

Norman (1968, in Leahey & Harris, 1997) established a "Pertinence" paradigm that
involved top-down processing rather than stimulus-driven processing. The focus of conscious
attention in this model was on a combination of sensory activation and top-down mediation.
This was corroborated by Cherry's earlier study (1953, in Bargh, 1996), which demonstrated
that self-relevant information is processed even when conscious attention is directed elsewhere,
such as when you hear your own name mentioned from across the room.

Selective attention research suggested that input is filtered and kept unavailable to
conscious processing for later activation alongside attended information. This information is
thought to be retained in short-term memory for retrieval if relevance is triggered (Anderson,
1995). Physiological investigations in the late 1970s, according to Posner (1997), separated
activity in a thalamic gating mechanism regulated from prefrontal regions during attention
processing. Since then, research has suggested that higher cortical levels are involved,
presumably in concert with thalamic mechanisms.

Divided attention:

The research of divided attention has traditionally centred on dual-task experiments, in which
participants attempt to accomplish two separate tasks under various conditions. According to
the findings, there are three primary elements that influence dual-task performance: 1) the task's
similarity to one another; 2) how often the subject has practised the task; and 3) the task's
difficulty. The topic of how much capacity the system has, how capacity is divided among
tasks, and how learning affects the use of this capacity is raised by divided attention tasks.
Capacity was thought to be a set amount in prior theories. Researchers began to look at
cognitive processing not just as a function of system capacity, but also as a function of resource
consumption. The research on divided attention has made a significant contribution to learning
theory and pedagogy.