ATTENTION (CONTD)…

INTERNAL FACTORS

Motives :
 The basic drives and urges of the individual are more important in securing his attention.
 Hunger , thirst , curiosity and sex are some motives.
Mental set up:
 A person always attends to one subject which the mind has a set.
 During exam any talk about it attracts the attention.
Past experience :
 Learning and previous experience facilitate attention.
 If we find that certain thing has been beneficial in the past we give more attention to it in the present.
Interest and attention:
We attend to objects in which we are interested and do not attend those in which we are not interested. Eg- our
preferences in sports influences uor attention.
Other Internal factors –
Emotions, habits, aim, meaning
SPAN OF ATTENTION

 Historically speaking it was sir William Hamilton who, in the year 1859, first of all tried to perform experiments
on span of attention.
 The maximum amount of attention that can be attended in period of the is called span of attention.
VISUAL ATTENTION

 The visual attention span is very less the time of exposure is very short ranging from 1/100 to 1/5 of a second.
 The mind can attend to only 4 or 5 separate units if the items are not grouped together.
 But if the items are combined into meaningful wholes, for instance words, a large number of items can be
perceived at once.
SPAN OF AUDITORY ATTENTION

 The number of auditory, impression perceived at a single instance is slightly greater.

 An adult can perceive eight sounds given rapidly in succession . But when sounds are given a rhythm, a much
larger number of sounds can be perceived.
SHIFTING/ FLUCTUATION OF ATTENTION:

 It may appear that our attention can be concentrated on a particular act for more time. But careful observation
clearly shows that we cannot concentrate on a single act or stimulus for more than few seconds.
 When we are seeing an object or listening to a sound, after few seconds, the attention will be shifted towards
other stimulus or other area of the stimulus for a fraction of time and returns to the original stimulus. This
process is called fluctuation.
 Recorded first by psychologist named Urbantschitsch(1875).
TYPES OF ATTENTION

 SELECTIVE ATTENTION
 SUSTAINED ATTENTION (VIGILANCE)
 DIVIDED ATTENTION
SELECTIVE ATTENTION :

 It is concerned mainly with the selection of stimuli/ objects from a large number of stimuli.
 Our perceptual system has a limited capacity to receive and process information due to which it can deal with
few stimuli at a given moment .