selective attention

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.

Attention

An important factor that affects our everyday lives is where we focus our attention. Are we focused on one thing at a time, or many things at a time? Trying to focus on many things at once can result in us not focusing on any one thing well. How much effort we put into our attention is also important. In other words, are we trying to focus and pay attention, or are we distracted by other things in our surroundings? While our brains are incredibly powerful, they can only allow us to process a little bit of information at a time from our environments. Selective attention allows us to focus in on something specific while blocking out other, less important, information. When a person experiences selective attention, it can be positive or negative. When selective attention allows a person to gather more details about the main subject, it is a positive experience. However, when selective attention prevents a person from gathering all the information necessary, it is a negative experience.

A friend of mine shared an example that illustrates attention, or lack thereof, from her work. She was attending a meeting with a large group of people that covered an important project that applied to everyone at the meeting to some degree. While my friend came to the meeting prepared to take notes with a pen and paper, almost everyone else brought their laptops. You would think this would be fine and shouldn’t create a problem, right? Unfortunately, that appears to have not been the case for everyone. My friend, as usual, sat in the back of the room. This gave her, unintentionally, a view of many people’s laptop screens. She noticed that many people appeared to be using their laptops not to take notes on the meeting, but rather, to work on other projects during the meeting.

This example relates to the class topic of attention. During this meeting, many people were not focusing their attention where it belonged – on the meeting presenters. In addition, by trying to pay attention to multiple things at once, were the attendees really listening to or doing any of them well? Finally, those members of the audience using selective attention techniques were not getting the complete message of the presentation.

Selective Attention

In class, we learned that selective attention is the ability to deal with some stimuli and not others. The world contains more information than our brains can handle, so we use selective attention to filter out what is most important to us. There are a few parts of attention that require specific efforts. The mental effort allows the individual to mentally filter other stimuli to focus on one specific stimuli. An example of this would be if you were in class and there were peers whispering behind you in class while trying to focus on the teacher lecturing a lesson. You have the ability to mentally block that conversation to focus on the lecture. The natural effort is a sensory adaptation, like when you put a bandage on our arm. Initially, you will feel the stickiness of the bandage stick to your arm hairs, but eventually, you will adapt to the feeling and forget it is even there and you can focus on other stimuli. Effortless attention is when we automatically select our attention without thinking about it. An example of this would be if you heard a loud noise, like a book drop on the floor. Our attention would immediately go towards where that sound came from.

An example of selective attention would be the “Monkey Business Illusion” shown in class. We were told to focus on the number of times a basketball was passed between people wearing white shirts, while changes were happening in the background (such as the gorilla being present, someone wearing a black shirt leaving the game, and how the curtain in the back changed from red to orange). We selected our attention towards the people wearing the white shirts passing the ball and were unaware of everything else happening in the background.

Relating selective attention to personal experience, just recently I went to the grocery store and saw a huge stand for a popular brand of pumpkin flavored coffee as soon as I walked through the doors. Not only that, pumpkin candles were being burned and fake, orange leaves, and scarecrows were decorated all around this Fall display. My attention was immediately drawn to this brand of coffee, even though I usually buy a different, cheaper brand in the back of the store. I ended up buying this brand of coffee because my attention was effortlessly drawn to it when I walked into the store. If it wasn’t for the huge stand, it was definitely the additions that triggered my senses (the sight of the decorations and smell of the candle) that attracted me to this display. This example of selective attention allowed me to process what was important to me, which was the name brand pumpkin coffee, and filter out other stimuli, in this case, the cheaper coffee in the back of the store.