Selective attention: definition, examples and theories that explain it

What is selective attention and why is it such an important concept in psychology?

One of those interesting psychological concepts is the one we will explain today, through its definition and the theories that have addressed it. We are talking about selective attention.

Selective attention: defining the concept

The selective attentionalso called focused attentionrefers to the ability of an organism to focus its mind on a particular stimulus or task, despite the presence of other environmental stimuli.despite the presence of other environmental stimuli. In other words, it is when a person gives preference to certain stimuli and is able to attend to relevant stimuli and inhibit distractors. Its function is essential due to the limitation of attentional capacity.

To exemplify this, you can imagine that you have a shelf full of shoes, and that, since you are going to run with some friends, you need the running shoes. As you have to look for the shoes to wear, this task requires selective attention, so you focus your attention on the shoes to find and wear them.

Theories explaining selective attention

There are several theoretical models that attempt to explain how selective attention works. The best known are those of Broadbent, Treisman, and Deutsch and Deutsch. All these models are known as filter or bottleneck models because they predict that we cannot attend to all of the inputs sensory inputs at the same time, so they attempt to explain why the material that passes through the filter is selected.

But what characterizes each model? We explain it below.

Broadbent's rigid filter model

The Donald Broadbent model is one of the best known in trying to explain attentional processing and specifically selective attention. This work began with the study of traffic controllers during the war. Broadbent noticed that these professionals because they receive many continuous messages that require attention, and are faced with a situation in which they can only deal with one message at a time, so they have to decide which is the most important. Broadbent designed a "dichotic listening" experiment to investigate the processes involved in shifting attentional focus.

Broadbent believes that information from all stimuli presented at a given time enters the "sensory buffer" (buffering center), also known as the "attentional buffer".also called short-term store. One of the inputs is selected for its physical characteristics to pass the filter. Since we have a limited capacity to process information, the filter is designed to prevent the information processing system from becoming saturated.

Sensory inputs that are not selected remain briefly in the sensory buffer, and if not they disappear quickly. Broadbent assumed that the filter rejected unattended messages in the initial stages of processing.

His research and the task of dichotic listening

In his research, he wanted to find out how individuals were able to focus attention selectivelyThe subjects received too much information, too much to process at the same time.

One of the ways Broadbent achieved this was by sending simultaneous and different messages (a three-digit number) to the right and left ear. Participants were asked to repeat both messages while listening to them. This is known as a "dichotic listening task".

The scientist was interested in how the digits would be repeated. Would they respond in the order they had heard it? Broadbent observed that the digits in a channel always repeated together. For example, if the left ear heard 673 and the left ear heard 987, subjects would respond 673 987, or 987 673. An 867637-type response, in which there would be alternation between channels, was never obtained.

Broadbent's research results

The results of his research led him to affirm that we can only pay attention to one channel at a time (in dichotic listening, each ear is one channel, so the other is lost). The information that is lost depends on the characteristics of the stimulus and the needs of the organism. Moreover, as already mentioned, the filter, which selects a channel for attention, does this by taking into account the physical characteristics: for example, the ear through which the information entered, the type of voice. Therefore, the meaning of what is said is not taken into account at any point in the filter. All semantic processing, i.e. understanding what the message says, takes place after the filter.

This model has received quite a lot of criticism, e.g., it does not precisely define the nature and functions of the processing system, it does not provide sufficient information as to how the message is processed.It does not provide sufficient information on how information can be transferred from one store to another, and it considers the working memory as a passive store.

Treisman's attenuated filter model

Selective attention requires that stimuli be filtered in order to direct attention. As explained above, Broadbent suggested that the material selected for attention (i.e., filtering) is done prior to semantic analysis. Well, Treisman's model maintains this idea of filtering, but with the difference that instead of eliminating the material, it attenuates it. Attenuation is like turning down the volume, so if you have four stimuli in a room (a crying baby, the television, a person talking on the phone, and the radio) you can turn down the volume of three to focus on the remaining stimulus.

The unattended material seems to be lost, but, if an unattended channel includes your name, for example, you may hear it because the material is there. In other words, the relevant message gets through the filter, but irrelevant ones are attenuated so as not to overload the central processing mechanism. Irrelevant messages receive some kind of analysis, which is why some salient feature is detected and our attention is diverted to those channels.

Deustch and Deustch's late filter model

Deustch and Deustch's model states that all stimuli are analyzed and reach a meaning in order to select the input that will pass into full consciousness.. The selection of this imput occurs depending on how important the stimulus is at the time.

Unlike Broadbent and Treisman's models, the stimuli are not filtered at the beginning of the cognitive process, but the filter would be present later in the process, and its main function would be to select the information that passes to active memory.