Selective Attention

Selective attention is very important in our daily lives, but we are often unaware of how it really works. Therefore, it is worthy to explore its characteristics and functions, ways to control it and investigation methods.

Selective attention, also known as focused attention, mainly controls our awareness of particular categories or entities in our environment. When it is involved, we focus entirely on one stimulus and ignore others (Elizabeth, 2006). For instance, when we are working hard on an essay, even if external noises are present, we would not be aware of them. Selective attention can be explained by some components of the brains sensory system being more sensitive to detect particular categories of stimuli. For example, if a person
One main reason selective attention is useful is that it acts as a gatekeeper that helps control the flow of information to brain mechanisms responsible for conscious processing of information, which have limited capacity (Broadbent, 1958; Martin, et al., 2007).

Among the various ways to investigate selective attention, audition and vision are the most extensively researched senses. Lets begin with selective auditory attention. The dichotic listening task devised by Cherry (1953) was the first experiment to test selective attention. Participants were asked to listen to one out of two messages presented at the same time, one to each ear. Cherry placed headphones on his participants and presented recordings of different spoken messages to each ear. Ultimately, participants were asked to shadow the message presented to one ear, repeating back as quickly and accurately as possible what the voice was saying (Eysenck, 2005). Results revealed that subjects were only able to notice the physical aspects (e.g. gender) of speakers for the non-shadowed message but couldnt recognize the semantic aspects of it regardless of how many times the non-shadowed message was repeated (Cherry, 1953). This was an evidence for
(1980) developed a cueing paradigm to demonstrate the role of attention in selectively transferring visual information into verbal short-term memory. Participants were asked to watch a video display screen manipulated by a computer as a small mark in the centre of the screen served as a fixation point for the participants gaze. They were shown a warning stimulus near the fixation point followed by a target stimulus, which was a letter displayed to either the left or the right of the fixation point. The warning stimulus was composed of either an arrow pointing left or right or simply a plus sign. Arrows presented served as cues for participants to expect the letter to occur either to the right or to the left. The plus sign contained no spatial information and was therefore a neutral stimulus. As soon as the letter was detected, participants had to press a button. The results of the study revealed that selective attention could influence the detection of visual stimuli. If a stimulus occurred the way people expected it, it was perceived more quickly. On the contrary, a stimulus would be perceived more slowly if it occurred where we did not expect it (Posner et al.,