ATTENTION

 Attention is a concentration of mental activity that allows you to take in a limited

portion of the vast stream of information available from both your sensory world and
your memory.
 Attention plays a major role in regulating how many items we can process in working
memory. Attention is also intertwined with our long-term memory and reading. When
we attempt to solve a problem, we need to pay attention to relevant information, while
ignoring trivial details.
 There are three kinds of attention processes: Selective attention, divided attention and
saccadic eye movements.

DIVIDED ATTENTION
 In a divided-attention task, you try to pay attention to two or more simultaneous
messages, responding to each as needed. In most cases, your accuracy decreases,
especially if the tasks are challenging.
 In the laboratory, researchers typically study divided attention by instructing
participants to perform two tasks at the same time.
 For example, Levy and his co-authors (2006) asked moderately experienced drivers to
perform a simulated-driving task. Specifically, each person sat in a “driver’s seat” and
used a steering wheel, following a car in front (the “lead car”), which was shown on a
large screen. One task required the participant to quickly press the brake pedal when
the lead car braked suddenly. The second task required the participant to make a
simple choice. For instance, a tone was presented either once or twice, and the
participant responded either “one” or “two.” The results showed that the drivers used
their brakes much more quickly if the choice task occurred just a fraction of a second
before the lead car braked, rather than at the same time.
 With further testing, Strayer and his colleagues discovered that the participants who
used cell phones showed a form of inattentional blindness. For example, their
attention had been reduced for information that appeared in the center of their visual
field
In some cases, people can perform divided attention tasks more competently if they
have had time to practice these tasks. For example, Wikman and her colleagues
(1998) compared experienced drivers with novice (inexperienced) drivers. The
researchers instructed all the participants to drive as they normally would, while per
forming several routine, secondary tasks: changing an audiocassette, dialling a cell
phone, and tuning the radio.
 The novices in this study divided their attention ineffectively. Specifically, they
frequently glanced away from the highway for longer than 3 seconds. More
worrisome still, their cars often swung to the side as they glanced away. The
experienced drivers managed to complete each task quickly and efficiently, glancing
away from the road for less than 3 seconds for each task.
SELECTIVE ATTENTION
  Selective attention is closely related to divided attention. In a divided-attention task,
people try to pay equal attention to two or more sources of information. In a selective
attention task, people are instructed to respond selectively to certain kinds of
information, while ignoring other information. Selective-attention studies often show
that people notice little about the irrelevant task. For example, you can converse with
your friend over other voices at a party because of selective attention.
 There are three basic categories of selective attention: 1.) an auditory task called
dichotic listening, (2) a visual task called the Stroop effect, and (3) visual search.
Dichotic Listening
 Dichotic listening is studied by asking people to wear earphones; one message is
presented to the left ear and a different message is presented to the right ear.
Typically, the research participants are asked to shadow the message in one ear; that
is, they listen to that message and repeat it after the speaker. If the listener makes
mistakes in shadowing, then the researcher knows that the listener is not paying
selective attention to that message.
 The logic of this experimental setup is as follows: The person must concentrate on the
message to be shadowed. Because the rate of presentation of information is so fast,
the shadowing task is difficult and requires a great deal of mental resources.
Therefore, fewer resources are available to process information from the non-
shadowed, non-attended message.
 However, people are likely to process the unattended message when (1) both
messages are presented slowly, (2) the task is not challenging, and (3) the meaning of
the unattended message is relevant.
 In addition, when people perform a dichotic listening task, they sometimes notice
when their name is inserted in the unattended message. Even if you are paying close
attention to one conversation, you may notice if your name is mentioned in a nearby
conversation; this phenomenon is sometimes called the cocktail party effect.
 In summary, when people’s auditory attention is divided, they can notice some
characteristics of the unattended message—such as the gender of the speaker and
whether their own name is mentioned. On the other hand, under more challenging
conditions, they may not even notice whether the unattended message is in English or
in a foreign language.

Stroop Effect
 The Stroop effect is named after James R. Stroop (1935), who created this well known
task. According to the Stroop effect, people take a long time to name the ink color
when that color is used in printing an incongruent word; in contrast, they can quickly
name that same ink color when it appears as a solid patch of color.
 In a typical study on the Stroop effect, people may require about 100 seconds to
name the ink color of 100 words that are incongruent color names (for example, blue
ink used in printing the word YELLOW). In contrast, they require only about 60
seconds to name the ink colors for 100 colored patches.
  Stroop effect demonstrates selective attention: People take longer to name a color
when they are distracted by another feature of the stimulus, namely, the meaning of
the words themselves
 Researchers have examined a variety of explanations for the Stroop effect. Some have
suggested that it can be explained by the parallel distributed processing (PDP)
approach. According to this explanation, the Stroop task activates two pathways at the
same time. One pathway is activated by the task of naming the ink color, and the other
pathway is activated by the task of reading the word. Interference occurs when two
competing pathways are active at the same time. As a result, task performance suffers.

Visual Search

 Visual search is a type of perceptual task requiring attention that typically involves an
active scan of the visual environment for a particular object or feature (the target)
among other objects or features (the distractors).
 Researchers have identified an impressive number of variables that influence visual
searches. For example, Jeremy Wolfe and his colleagues (2005) found that people are
much more accurate in identifying a target if it appears frequently. If the target
appears—in a visually complex background—on 50% of the trials, participants
missed the target 7% of the time. When the same target appeared in this same
complex background on only 1% of the trials, participants missed the target 30% of
the time.

Filter Theory

 To explain the findings of dichotic listening, Broadbent (1958) proposed a filter

theory of attention, which states that there are limits on how much information a
person can at tended to at any given time. Therefore, if the amount of information
available at any given time exceeds capacity, the person uses an attentional filter to let
some information through and block the rest. The filter is based on some physical
aspect of the attended message: the location of its source or its typical pitch or
loudness, for instance. Only material that gets past the filter can be analyzed later for
meaning.
 Broadbent’s filter theory maintains that the attentional filter is set to make a selection
of what message to process early in the processing, typically before the meaning of
the message is identified.
 Messages that present a great deal of information quickly take up more mental
capacity; fewer of them can be attended to at once. The filter thus protects us from
“information overload” by shutting out messages when we hear too much information
to process all at once. However, two messages that contain little information, or that
present information slowly, can be processed simultaneously.