A topic that stood out to me during class was selective attention. Selective attention allows us to process information that is important to us, and to allow us to focus on a limited part of our environment. This is why magicians use flashes of light and people can drive into trains. It also explains why in class, people that were counting the number of passes in the video did not notice the gorilla walking through the scene, the person wearing the black shirt leaving, or the curtain changing colors. Since everyone’s attention was on the people passing the ball, they did not notice the other part of the environment that was changing.
I think everyone experiences selective attention every day. I know that I experience it a lot, when I’m simply just walking to class. I have been told many times that people will start talking to me and I ignore them. Now that I have learned about selective attention, I know that I am not ignoring them, I am simply just not paying attention to them when they start talking because I am focusing on something else. Usually I am just focused on what I’m looking at when I’m walking or what song I’m listening to.
When I was in high school I played softball, and I experienced a lot of selective attention during that time. It was hard to focus on all of the aspects of the game at once. As I was running the bases, I would be paying attention to where I was running and where the ball was. Since I was already focusing on multiple things, it was hard to focus on my coach directing me on what to do. Because of this it was usually up to me to make the decisions while running the bases based on what I was already paying attention to. Also, after the games my parents and friends would ask me if I could hear them cheering for me. My answer was always no because due to selective attention I would block out the insignificant things going on around me.
From what I have learned about selective attention in class, I have realized that it has impacted my life in many ways, from simply walking on the street to playing a sport. I never knew there was a real term and explanation for this experience until taking this class.
I thought selective attention was a really interesting topic too that we learned about in class. The video that we watched was crazy like you said with the gorilla appearing and most people had no idea he was there. This is because everyone was focusing their attention on how many tosses they had and nothing else. Along with that, it was amazing how Professor Wedes changed his shirt and most people had zero clue he walked out of the room. I can relate to your example of using selective attention in high school with softball. As a swimmer, during the longest event, the 500-yard freestyle, I always messed up how many laps I had swam because I was so focused on the race. Good thing there were counters that put the lap number you were on or I would have definitely swam more or less than the 20 laps. Also, like you said, my parents always asked me if I saw them in the stands screaming but I always didn’t because of how focused I was on the race. Overall, selective attention is a very interesting topic because we encounter it all of the time.