ATTENTION

• Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete

aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while
ignoring other perceivable information.
• As William James (1890) wrote,

"Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one
out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.
Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence."
 Few Crucial Points related to Attention

§ Attention is limited in terms of duration and capacity. It is for this limitation,

that multi-tasking hardly bears productive results because of this limited
attention capacity.

§ The process of attention involves selectively attending to certain specific

variables while filtering out the less relevant or various other variables.

§ Attention is a key component of our cognitive system which starts right

from the stage of our birth. For example, a newborn quickly responds to the
environment’s stimuli such as loud noise by turning his head towards that
direction.
 Types of Attention
• Classification of Attention by Ross: According to Ross, attention can be
classified into:

1. Non-Volitional (Involuntary Attention): This type of attention does

not involve any role of will; instead it is aroused either by instincts and
hence called enforced attention or is produced by our sentiments and
therefore called as spontaneous non-volitional attention.

Examples of non-volitional attention could be attention paid to the

members of the opposite gender or a mother’s attention on noticing her
crying child.
2. Volitional (Voluntary Attention): Volitional attention exercises the will
and demands our conscious effort for arriving at a solution or achieving
certain goals.

Unlike Non Volitional attention, Volitional attention is less spontaneous or

automatic.

Examples of volitional attention could be paying attention while solving maths

problem or attention focused on while answering examination questions.
Attention can further be categorized on the basis of needs or circumstances which
we may be faced with:

• Sustained Attention: It is the ability to pay attention to only one task by consciously
concentrating on that task only for a long time enough and by avoiding all other forms of
distractions or deviations.

• This kind of attention requires a good deal of focus as well as determination for being able
to concentrate on a given task by keeping away all the distractions. Sustained attention
examples could be reading a book, memorizing a chapter or following a classroom
lecture.

• Selective Attention: In this case, the listener chooses to pay attention to only a specific
stimulus which is present in the environment while ignoring the other stimuli. This kind of
attention does not depend on the stimulus but depends essentially on the attentive
capabilities of an observer.
• Divided Attention: In case of divided attention, the user pays attention to two or more tasks
at the same time and is also sometimes regarded as Multi-tasking which involves juggling
between two or more than two tasks at the same time.

• Its examples could be texting somebody while attending a meeting. Divided attention uses
mental focus on a very large scale; hence because of divided attention the user may get
exhausted very quickly.

• Alternating Attention: Though this attention can be closely related to divided attention, but
is different as in case of divided attention we split our attention between two tasks, while in
case of alternating attention, the entire attention is shifted from one task to another or is
done alternately.
• Visual Attention: Visual attention makes use of the sensory organ
eyes for paying attention to certain details. Visual attention pays
attention to the details or inputs which are received by the eyes only
and blurs out all the other stimuli which is present in the environment.
Visual attention is put to use in case of advertising and reading.

• Auditory Attention: This form of attention pays attention only to the

sense of hearing only. Paying attention to an important
announcement can be an example of auditory attention. Auditory and
visual attention both function in conjunction with each other.
Attention can be influenced by both external and internal factors.

External Factors: These are the factors which are external in nature and are usually governed by the
characteristics of the stimuli.

• These external factors could be related to the nature of the stimuli, the intensity as well as the size of
the stimuli, the degree to which contrast, variety or change is present in the stimuli.

• The extent to which the exposure to a stimulus is repeated will, also determine the strength of the
attention. Moreover, a stimulus which is in a state of motion will be able to catch our attention more
quickly than a stationery one.
• Internal (Subjective) factors: The subjective factors which influence
attention are interests, motive, mind set and our attitudes & moods. It is
believed that interest is the mother of attention, as we pay attention or
focus on those objects about which we have interest.

• Similarly, our needs or motives equally govern our attention for specific
events or objects. Moreover, the mental readiness of a person to respond to
certain stimuli or preparedness will also determine the attention level for
that person.
THEORIES OF ATTENTION
 BOTTLENECK THEORY OF ATTENTION

• The bottleneck theory suggests that individuals have a limited amount of

attentional resources that they can use at one time.
• Therefore, information and stimuli are 'filtered' somehow so that only the
most salient and important information is perceived.
• This theory was proposed by Broadbent in 1958. Picture a large bottle filled
with sand that is turned upside down.
• The bottleneck restricts the flow of sand so that it slowly pours out instead
of coming out all at once.

• Stimuli in our environment is the same way - if we perceived every visual,

auditory, olfactory, and tactile sense all at once all of the time our brains
would be overflowing.
 Selective Attention

• Selective attention, as the name suggests, is the process of selectively attending

to one stimulus from among various other stimuli which occur simultaneously.

• In a typical selective attention experiment by Cherry (1953), Known as the

‘Dichotic Listening Task’, the participants were presented with two different
auditory stimuli directed to different ears simultaneously over headphones.

• They participants had to repeat out loud, the contents of the message they heard
in one ear (a process known as ‘Shadowing’), while ignoring the message being
presented in the other ear.
• Results obtained on this task showed that the people did not recall the shadowed
message well, suggesting that most of the processing necessary to shadow the
attended message occurred in working memory and not in the long term memory.

• The performance on the unattended message was worse, and the participants
were not able to report anything about its content. The participants could not
detect the semantic features such as, the shift from one language to another or
the repetition of items, of this unattended channel.

• However, it was observed that the physical attributes of the unattended message
were detected by the participants, such as a switch from male to female voice, or
a switch from human voice to the sound of a musical instrument
 Filter Theory
• The filter theory of attention was proposed by Broadbent (1958), which states that a
person can attend to only a limited amount of information at any given time.

• Thus at any time if the amount of information exceeds capacity, then a person uses
some attentional filters in order to let through some of the information and block the
rest.

• This attentional filter is based on some physical aspect of the attended message, and
only the message that gets past the filter can be analyzed later for meaning.

• For instance, two sources of information gain access in parallel into sensory buffer.
• Then one input is allowed through a filter based on its basic characteristics,
while the other remains on the buffer for later processing. Beyond the filter,
a mechanism processes the information thoroughly (meaning etc.)

• This theory suggests that the attentional filter protects people form
‘information overload’, when too much information is to be processed.

• This is done by early selection of the messages to be processed, before its

meaning is identified.
• However, the theory has faced a few contradictions, the most prominent
being the ‘Cocktail party effect’ given by Moray (1959).

• According to this effect, the shadowing performance is disturbed when one’s

own name is embedded in either the attended or the unattended message.

• Thus, if a message content is perceived to be ‘important’, it can penetrate

through the attentional filters set up to block unattended messages, as
opposed to what has been proposed by the filter theory
 Attenuation Theory
• Annie Triesman, in 1960, proposed a modified filter theory, known as the ‘Attenuation
theory’. According to this theory, the unattended messages are not completely blocked
before they can be processed for meaning, but are just turned down in their volume.

• The messages coming in are subjected to three types of analysis.

1. In the first analysis, the physical properties of the message are analyzed.

2. The second analysis in on the linguistic level, where the message is broken down into
words and syllables.

3. The third kind of analysis is the semantic analysis, where the meaning of the message is
processed.
• In a typical experiment, a story was presented to the ear to be attended in a
dichotic listening task.
• After some time, the story was switched from attended ear to unattended ear.
It was seen that the participants mistakenly shadowed from attended ear to
unattended ear after this phenomenon of ‘switched ears’.
• These results supported the assumption that the unattended messages are
not completely blocked but weakened, and that significant stimuli can still be
recovered from such unattended messages.