Divided Attention Essay

Attention is considered to be a core cognitive process, it refers to how people actively process specific information in the environment. Attention refers to how people select from information and stimuli in the environment, facilitating processing of some of the stimuli and inhibiting processing of others. "Everyone knows what attention is, it is the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought...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, dazed, scatterbrained state. “This definition of attention was proposed by psychologist William James (1890). This review will focus on literature that gives explanation to selective attention. Selective attention refers to the process where a person is able to select out of many stimuli and focus on the one they want and ignore other stimuli.

In the article “Divided Attention”, author David Glenn presents the problem of multitasking and the inefficiencies it causes to students and average day people, arguing that multitasking and the overconfidence that goes with it limits the abilities of the students without them realizing it. The author is able to successfully argue his point by using studies ran by credible sources as evidence to support his claims and by being able to connect to his intended audience by making it easier for the reader to understand more complex topics in humorous ways.

Attention is defined as “the action of dealing with or taking special care of someone or something.” (Unknown). I define attention as the action of carefully observing, analyzing and interpreting a given act by someone or something. Attention is something that all children need especially from their parents. Parents need to give attention to their children to know what is going on with them, in order not to lose sight of who they are becoming.

Attention is something that people can crave or something that people may need. Too much of it could lead to a boost of unneeded ego, leading to someone that is overly cocky, and too little of it can lead to a lack of self esteem. In the books Confetti Girl, and Tortilla Sun, attention something that the books revolve around using different points of view. These books use the narrator and compare their point of view their parent's point of view. These books compare points of view to get the idea that either a lack of, or a surplus of attention can lead to unwanted things.

In the essay it will include; how distractions can affect your reaction time. How the braking distance is affected by speed. What the design of a vehicle and road conditions, can have an impact on a pedestrian. How the speed affects the occupants, if the car were to collide with a rigid object. And what design features are being put in place to minimise fatalities in car accidents.

The current study examined the impact of a distractor task involving similar or dissimilar material on the learning of different stimuli sets (consonants vs. digits). Although there may be different rates of recall between the stimuli sets, the primary hypothesis is that there will be an interaction effect between the different stimuli sets and the material presented in the distractor task. Specifically, individuals attempting to recall a learned set of consonants are predicted to have a lower rate of recall when a distracter task involves the processing of unrelated words as compared to the processing of numbers. Conversely, individuals attempting to recall a learned set of digits are to have a lower rate of recall when a distractor task involves

Describe: There was 6 people in the room passing around 2 different basketballs. The one group of people was wearing white while the other was wearing black. The point of this video is to count how many times the ball is passed around among the people wearing white. As you are trying to count all the group members they are moving and passing the ball. You are so focused on counting that you miss the gorilla walking right in the middle of the group. The ball was passed 15 times around the group wearing white.

The human brain has a limited capacity to deal with the incoming information but yet every moment we encounter a large variety of stimuli like sights, sounds and smells. However, as mentioned above if we encounter stimuli which conflict with our schemas, we reconstruct our memory in order to fit our schemas. The human brain therefore focuses on some aspects of the situation while ignoring the others in order to cope with the sensory barrage. This process of choosing stimuli is called selective attention. Eyewitnesses tend to collect information that relates to their interests and may ignore other vital aspects

Auditory selective attention modulates the cortical responses. Because of the corticofugal feedback from the auditory cortex to the brainstem level, the brainstem responses are affected by higher order mechanisms. Auditory selective attention increases selectivity and shifts the responses to the target sound. In this study in order to evaluate selectivity at the brainstem level during auditory selective attention, the cross-phasogram method was used. The responses were obtained in 15 normal hearing subjects. In this study, the cross-phasogram method was applied to the brainstem responses to the diotically-presented /ba/ and /da/ stimuli. Then it was applied to the brainstem responses to the dichotically-presented /ba/ and /da/ stimuli while

Attentional bias can be defined as increased absorption of and enhanced sensitivity to certain environmental cues (Williams, Muller, Reas, & Thaw, 1999). One way to study attentional biases is with lexical decision tasks (Hill & Kemp-Wheeler, 1989). In a typical lexical decision task, subjects are asked to determine as quickly and accurately as possible if a string of letters displayed on a screen is a word or nonword; both accuracy and speed are predicted to improve with more salient words. For example, if a firefighter read the word fire on the screen, he or she would be expected to respond faster and more accurate than if he or she read the word sock.

This is only the illusion of attention which makes us believe that we are getting everything around us. The authors, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons explained this illusion with their studies and real-life stories of people to explain this illusion more clearly. The illusion of attention is the link to all the illusions. The authors have provided multiple examples to

In 1935, John Ridley Stroop conducted an experiment at George Peabody College for teachers in the United States. Stroop used 70 college undergraduates as subject in his experiment, he compared times for reading names of colours and naming colours themselves. The aim was to determine if the colour of the word affected the ability to read it. In the experiment, there was three different conditions. In the first condition participants were asked to read words as quickly as possible whereas participants had to name the ink colour in which each word were printed as quickly as possible in second condition. In a third condition (the incongruent condition), participants had to name the ink colour in which each word was printed, but in this condition the words themselves were colour names. For example, the word ‘GREEN’ was presented in the colour orange and you were required to read this colour instead of the word itself. Stroop found that the participants were much slower at naming the ink colours when the stimuli were themselves colours as (third condition), indicating that a possible explanation for the Stroop effect is that people quickly and automatically process the meaning of the word.

This definition emphasises how attention is thought of as a selective process. It seems clear from common sense that we cannot attend to all stimuli at once, so some kind of selection must take place as to what information we attend to and process further, and what is disregarded.

The participants for Experiment 1 & 2 consisted of two females and two males. The two girls were Sue 13 and Eve 14, plus the two boys Jim 13 and Tom 7 years old (Carr & Durand, 1985, p.113). In both experiments the independent variable was level of tasks giving to the participants whether difficult or easy. The dependent variable is the amount of attention giving to the participants when giving the tasks (Carr & Durand, 1985, p.113). In Experiment 1 in a sessions a child received either an easy task or a difficult task; in addition, a child received adult attention during either 100% or 33% of the time intervals into which the session was divided. The two levels of task difficulty and the two levels of adult attention were combined to produce three conditions: easy 100, easy 33, and difficult 100 (Carr & Durand, 1985, p.113). Comparison of easy 100 with easy 33 permitted

We are replicating J.R. Stroop’s original experiment The Stroop Effect (Stroop, 1935). The aim of the study was to understand how automatic processing interferes with attempts to attend to sensory information. The independent variable of our experiment was the three conditions, the congruent words, the incongruent words, and the colored squares, and the dependent variable was the time that it took participants to state the ink color of the list of words in each condition. We used repeated measures for the experiment in order to avoid influence of extraneous variables. The participants were 16-17 years of age from Garland High School. The participants will be timed on how long it takes them to say the color of the squares and the color of the words. The research was conducted in the Math Studies class. The participants were aged 16-17 and were students at Garland High School. The results showed that participants took the most time with the incongruent words.