Selective Attention is the process of putting more energy into processing what’s important and funneling out what some one finds not important. We are able to bring information into our Short-term memory through selective attention. Selective attention can happen with us purposefully doing it and it can happen unintentionally as well. If you’re in a loud class room and you are trying to hear the professor talk, you are going to use selective attention to only listen to the professor. Unintentionally may be a scenario like this: your walking down the street with your friend while they are telling you a story, you see a car coming and so you stop at the cross walk but you didn’t hear anything your friend said. Your attention was on the car because you found it more important to not get hit by a car rather than to hear your friends story.
Every time we listen to something, hear something, or taking any type of sensory information in, we process it through selective attention. Anything that seems important will be brought to our short term memory. Anything that wasn’t important, we will funnel out and it will not reach our short-term memory which will result in no memory of it at all. If we do not encode something, we can not retrieve it.
Personally an example of selective attention that has happened to me is the following: I was home with my sister and watching a movie that interested me, she got up from the couch, walked right in front of me, and I had no memory of her leaving the room. A few minutes later, I went to talk to her and i realized she wasn’t there. This was selective attention because I found watching the movie was more important and interesting then my sister walking across the room.
I feel that we have all experienced the, “Wait, when did you leave the room…?” example of selective attention.
Selective attention is a really cool concept to me, mostly cause I’ve always sort of known what it was before learning it was an actual thing in the field of psychology. The example you gave of filtering out loud conversation during a lecture is one that I’ve always found to be amazing because I’ve taken notice of it for years before finding out it’s a feature of the brain. Selective attention is such a powerful force on the human brain, and we don’t usually realize that it’s taking affect until we actively think about it. I always have the issue of zoning out during class and thinking about random stuff that isn’t relevant to the lecture, and I miss a lot of important information until I finally realize that I’m zoning out. It’s always tough for me personally to keep my brain on track all the way throughout a lecture.