Everyone has been to a bar, a restaurant bar or probably knows a bartender. The fast pace drink making, different customers shouting a multitude of drink and shot orders at you, counting money and giving correct change back, and more, are all different things that pull our attention in different directions. How do we explain the shifts of attention that bartenders use on a daily basis?
Attention is the ability ro focus on specific stimuli or locations. There are differnt types of attention that are all used in bartendering. For example, Dee (our bartender) attempts to focus on remembering what goes in an Old Fashioned while ignoring two customers at the bar who are engaging in heated political talk (typial). This type of attention is called selective attention, which is attending to one thing while consciously ignoring all other stimuli. A type of attention that can negatively impact this is a distraction (a fellow co-worker coming over to ask a question about an item on the menu while Dee is making the cocktail).
Two common types of attention frequently used by bartenders are divided attention and attentional capture. Divided attention is used probably the most out of types of attention, which is defined as paying attention to more than one thing at a time. Dee, is making two different kind of cocktails, a margartia and an old fashioned, while holding a side conversation with a fellow co-worker, and mentally calculating the customers’ totals for their drinks. All of these activites are done simultaneously. Attentional capture is a common conscious and subconscious activity done by bartenders due to staying updated with their surroundings. Bars are normally loud and noisy by trade, but a sudden WOOHOO or a glass shatter, quickly shifts the bartender’s attention away from the task they are currently doing to whatever catches their ear/eye. Attentional capture is also a positive trait to have as a bartender, especially when it comes to being observant with customer activity.
Finally, the more obvious method of attention, visual scanning. This one can also go hand in hand with attentional capture. While a bartender is engaging in visual scanning, there could be something during that scan that halts the bartenders gaze and captures their attention to that moment, such as a drunk customer stumbling toward the door or another customer getting aggressive at the pool tables.
Bartending is one job that I feel engages the different aspects of attentional, consistently and sometimes simultaneously. If this job constantly engages the different levels of attention, wouldn’t it aid in sharpening and improving our attention in other areas of life as well?
Goldstein, E. B. (2010). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience (4th ed.). Cengage Learning.
Darriana, your blog post about bartending an attention was interesting and fascinating at the the same time. I commend you on this because I loved how you picked up on the different tasks and situations at hand, Your example of a bartender focusing on the making of old fashioned drinks as apposed to the political talk that was going on was great.
With selective attention, we don’t always pay attention to each and every sensory experience. We turn our attention to the important elements of our environment, while the other things that are going on pass us by unnoticed. I could only begin to think how hard it is to be a bartender and focus on the task at hand of making drinks instead of getting wrapped up in all of the political talk from the other people at the bar. It would be extremely distracting and in this case I can understand why selective attention is used to focus on the task at hand.
Because bartending is a type of job that requires the ability to attend to multiple people around them, bartenders have to be picky about the things they pay attention to. In this case I thought it was fantastic that you brought up visual scanning. I can only imagine how hard it would be to be stopped with something like a stumbling customer who’s drunk cause at the time it caught my eye, because visually it caught my attention. It would cause a massive headache to stop everything your doing to attend to that drunk customer who is stumbling all over the place.
Hi Darriana,
I like the topic of your post. It had never come to my mind how many of the techniques you mentioned bartenders use while they are working. The selective attention one seems huge. I imagine that being behind a bar for a few hours at a time would enable you to hear some very interesting conversation. It is probably hard to ignore some of the more interesting or funny conversations; maybe offensive conversations. Being able to drown out the noise and focus on making several drinks at a time requires good use of our brains!
I also like how you pointed out that through all of their tasks, a good bartender makes time to be friendly with the customer while they serve them. Talking, listening, making drinks, cleaning, and serving are all a part of what they do as bartenders. Attention shifting skills are definitely necessary to be a bartender!