attention and its different theories

2. WHAT IS ATTENTION?
• ‘Attention is the concentration
of consciousness upon one
subject, rather than upon
another’.
– Dumville
(1938)
• ‘Attention can be defined as a
process, which compels the
individual to select some
particular stimulus according
to his interest and attitude out
of the multiplicity of stimuli
present in the environment’.
– R. N. Sharma
(1967)

3. Everyone knows what attention is. It is the
taking possession by the mind, in clear
and vivid form, of one out of what seems
several simultaneously objects or trains of
thoughts. Focalization, concentration of
consciousness are of its essence. It implies
withdrawal from some things in order to
deal effectively with others, and is a
condition, which has a real opposite in the
confused, dazzled, scatterbrained state
which in French is called ‘distraction’ and
‘zerstreuheit’ in German
William James

4. Interrelated
Ideas about
Attention
one is constantly
confronted with a
plethora of
information
there are serious
limitations in how
much one can attend to.
Therefore, one selects
the stimulus he/she
attends.
with sufficient practice and
experience, some tasks become less
demanding of our attention

5. • Goal driven
• Endogenous mechanism
• Voluntary
• Slow time course
• Interpretation driven from
data
•Stimulus driven
•Exogenous mechanism
•Automatic
•Rapid Transient time course
•Interpretation driven from
expectations
Top Down
Processes
Bottom Up
Processes

6. Selection Theory
• the selection theory was one of the
earliest theory of attention.
• The theorists propounded that one
attends to the stimuli according to their
physical characteristics, like colour,
intensity, etc.
Late selection
theory
Early selection
theory

7. 7
Selective Attention
• Filtering or selecting: When you try to ignore
the many stimuli or events around you so you
can focus on just one, the ones you are trying
to ignore are distractions that must be
eliminated or excluded. The mental process
of eliminating those distractions, eliminating
unwanted messages, is called filtering or
selecting.

8. 8
Broadbent’s Filter Theory
In Broadbent’s view, the auditory mechanism
acts as a selective filter; regardless of how
many competing channels or messages are
coming in, the filter can be tuned, or
switched, to any one of the messages, based
on characteristics such as loudness or pitch.

9. 9
Broadbent’s filter theory of selective
attention

10. COCKTAIL PARTY EFFECT
• Introduced by Cherry (1953), this theory focuses on
the individual’s ability to attend to a single talker
among a mixture of conversations and background
noises, ignoring other conversations.
• The experiment was conducted on dichotic listening
task.
• The subjects were asked to listen to two different
messages from a single loudspeaker at the same time
and try to separate them; and only repeat one
message and not the other, known as 'shadowing'
task.
• His work revealed that the ability to separate sounds
from background noise is based on the
characteristics of the sound, such as gender of the
speaker, direction from which the sound is coming,
the pitch or the speaking speed.
• When the messages were similar in characteristics,
subjects were unable to complete the task
successfully.

11. 11
Selective Attention and the
Cocktail Party Effect (cont.)
Shadowing Task
A task devised by E. Colin Cherry. In this task, Cherry recorded
spoken messages of different sorts on tape, then played the
tape to a subject who was wearing headphones. The subject’s
task was to “shadow” or repeat the message to the right ear
out loud as soon as it was heard. In most of the experiments,
subjects were also told to ignore the other message, the one
coming to the left ear.
Conclusions: Subjects could report accurately on a variety of
physical characteristics of the unattended (left ear) message,
but were unable to notice other things about it.