Attention Definition

Have you ever wonder why in some critical situations such as during exams we seem not to remember important informations we want. Have you asked yourself how come when you are talking to someone and another person standing somewhere mentions your name, you immediately become alert and listen attentively to what you heard? Also have you tried to understand how come in noisy place such as the football stadium you can still focus intensely on the players on the field. To understand these situations, a lot of things have to be considered.

Individuals focus on particular event(s) at any given point in time. This focus requires a lot of mental effort or concentration and this is what cognitive psychologist term attention. Attention refers to the concentration and focusing of mental effort (Best, 1995). Focus is selective, divisible and shiftable. Focus is selective when we pay attention to some things and not others. It is shifable when we are able to move our attention from one thing to another and focus is divisible when we can attend to two or more activities
Considering the nature of activity, if it is difficult to perform then a lot of cognitive effort will be required and vice versa. According to Broadbent (1958), the amount of information that can be attended to at anytime is limited, if the amount exceeds our cognitive resources capacity, an attention filter is brought in that allow some information in whereas the rest are blocked. Thus, we make little meaning out of blocked information. This filter saves us from information overload when there is too much information to process. Treisman (1960) also explained this using the attenuation theory of attention. This theory postulates that the volume of the unattended information is turned down and we can make meaning out of them because they might still be