Selective Attention Essay

You may be familiar with passive listening, passive listening is where an is involved in a conversation however, multitasking by listening to several different conversations or events happening in the background (Bell & Smith, 2010; Jennings, 2012). There has been perhaps a number of times you have slipped into this passive state of attention it seems as if you are actively listening to a conversation but truly, there are other things happening that seem to be more worthy of your attention (Jennings, 2012; Scanlan, 2011).

Listening is ‘Not an attempt to understand something that is being said’ but ‘Just an attention to the activity of sounds’

Attention is thought to be selective-focused on one subject at a time. Traditionally, it has been assumed that automatic processing is involuntary, it does not require attention, and is relatively fast; whereas, controlled processing is voluntary, does require attention, and is relatively slow. We can conclude from this that the more we repeat a certain material or tasks the more it becomes automatic and effortless to us.

Selective attention is a cognitive process used when reacting to only certain stimuli when multiple occur simultaneously, helping the human brain be productive, focus, and filter out unnecessary information. This phenomenon is explained by the Stroop effect theory. This was studied by Stroop (1935) in the experiment we will be loosely replicating to further increase credibility of the theory. He aimed to explore how cognitive interferences affect the reaction time of a task. In the experiment, participants were asked to to verbally name the color of the ink or the meaning of the word depending on the condition. He began by testing words with congruences, incongruencies, and a neutral control. The congruent words matched the meaning and color, the incongruencies were random and the color did not match meaning, and the neutral control was black ink. By recording the time

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.

The article by Avital-Cohen and Tsal (2016) discussed the flanker task experiment, which asserted that distractor interference happens unconsciously as a result of focused attention toward the target. The results from the original flanker task indicated that participants had slower responses for incongruent trials, since the distractors are inconsistent with the target and would require a different response (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). However, Avital-Cohen and Tsal (2016) questioned the findings from the flanker task experiment. They decided to challenge the idea that only the target stimuli receives top-down processing, and not the distractors (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). The first experiment aimed to test whether the distractor interference is purely bottom-up processing as claimed in the flanker task. The experiment manipulated participants’ expectations of the target using the context effect - a type of top-down processing - by changing the distractors to be either letters or digits (Psych 240 lecture, 9/21/16). Then, the researchers conducted a second experiment and eliminated the ambiguity of distractors. They wanted to test whether the result from experiment 1 was caused by an overall bias or the ambiguous distractors. In experiment 2, the researchers predicted that they would obtain similar results to the first experiment only if the results were due to an overall bias effect (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). This study allows us to deepen our understanding of available

Selective attention is the focusing of a conscious awareness on a particular stimulus, which is what the little girl as well as all humans have. It is impossible for us to focus on various things at the same time. Additionally, the Cocktail Party Effect comes to prove that, because it is the phenomenon of being able to focus on one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli. We tend to focus on one thing, so we experience inattentional blindness, the inability to see visible objects when our attention is directly elsewhere. It is believed that the little girl can hear due to frequency theory which of the rate of nerve impulses traveling up the auditory never matches the frequency of a tone, thus

Cherry, a British physiologist, has suggested the cocktail party effect for the first time about 60 years ago. It means that a person can attend to one speaker while ignoring others at the same time, and that is happened just by selective attention[2]. In many studies, it has been showed that during auditory selective attention, amplitude of some of the components of ERPs increase which causes new waves such as Nd and N2 with longer latency. These findings represent the role of higher processing in selecting the auditory stream. Hilyard in 1973 introduced an EEG-based auditory selective attention protocol to investigate the brain`s electrophysiological activity during the auditory attention. It has been demonstrated that N1 amplitude of the

Eight years ago, in 2007, Cynthia Stafford was a 53-year-old software account executive living in California. She had a good life, but she imagined it could be so much better.

Have you ever ignored the phone ringing to focus on something more important or more interesting to you? Something such as diving into a mouthwatering thanksgiving day meal, or sleeping in and enjoying that wonderful dream you were having? Do you tend to forget the details that some others seem to notice? When doing a task that is tedious or detail oriented, do you notice what it is that you are working on but not whatever it is that is going on around you? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you suffer from selective attention. However there is no need t panic. Why, you may ask? Every human being has selective attention. “Selective attention is the result of the mind working to store memories… People are often attuned to give

Selective listening is when you pick and chose of what you want to listen to preferably the things that stand out to you or sound more interesting to you. In this film Kevin hart had a personal butler in his suit, his butler would offer him all kinds of alcohol and telling him all the extra the suit offers but hart didn’t pay attention about how much those things are. In this case Kevin hart was using selective hearing because all he wanted to hear was alcohol and all the extras that came with the place but he left out listening to how costly it was.

Late selection models provide a possible explanation for results obtained in some dichotic listening experiments where processing of unattended stimuli did seem to take place. For example, Corteen and Wood (1972, as cited in Naish, 2010), paired electric shocks with certain words, so that a conditioned galvanic skin response (GSR) took place. Later, when these words were again presented to the unattended ear , (without electric shocks), the GSR still occurred for these words as well as other words from the same category, indicating that processing for meaning had indeed taken place. Late section theories could also be used to explain the cocktail party effect (Naish , 2010) i.e. if someone is attending to one conversation at a party and their name is mentioned in another conversation in the room, they are able to hear their name and switch their

People tend to process incoming information quicker than its output by the speaker causing them to quickly jump to conclusions, evaluate, or predict what will be said next. "Most individuals speak at the rate of 175 to 200 words per minute. However, research suggests that we are very capable of listening and processing words at the rate of 6000 to 1,000 words per minute....This unused brain power can be a barrier to effective listening, causing the auditor to miss or misinterpret what others are saying."(Lewis 2003). Listeners are often side tracked when listening, whether it be internal or external distractions. People have a habit of only listening to what they want to hear instead of what is actually being said.

Research carried out on attention has mainly been associated with the selective processing of incoming sensory information. It proposes, to some degree, our awareness of the world depends on what we choose to focus on and not simply the stimulation received by our senses. Attention is often linked to a filter that screens out most potential stimuli whilst allowing a select few to pass through into our conscious awareness, however, a great deal of debate has been devoted to where the filter is situated in the information processing chain (Martindale, 1991). Psychologists have made extensive contributions to this subject matter in the past century. Notable examples include Donald Broadbent's filter theory of attention (1958), which set the