The Effects of Selective Attention on Perception

One of the great breakthroughs in psychology of the later 20th century was the work done by certain researchers in the area of perception. Several of them came to understand that human beings simply cannot absorb all the information and stimuli they encounter every day -- at least not consciously. The mind is like a milk bottle, with a neck to narrow to let everything in at once. The information people do choose to absorb -- their selective attention -- affects how they perceive everything from the world around them to their relationships.

Prioritizing

• An experiment done on air traffic controllers by researcher Donald Broadbent showed that while each controller received many simultaneous and competing messages, he could only function when he discerned which message was the most important at the moment and acted on it. His selective attention is given at any moment to the most important message, and once that is dealt with, he then chooses the next most important message. As with the air traffic controllers, selective attention to competing messages informs our perception of the necessary action at any moment.

Attenuation

• Attenuation means that if there are many messages coming at a person, the person will focus primarily on one, but still be at least partially open to hearing the others. According to the Treisman Attenuation Model, this accounts for what is known as the "cocktail party phenomenon," in which a person isn't paying attention to others' conversations, but still hears his or her name spoken across the room at a cocktail party. Attenuation allows people to focus mainly on one thing, but still be aware of other things going on.

Emotional Response

• Our emotional responses are often directly connection to our perception of events, and we can only form a perception based on selective attention--the things we choose to pay attention to or give meaning to. For example, we only pay attention to colors in certain situations -- selective attention -- but when we do it's to attribute meaning to it ("stop," "danger," "debt"). According to Communication Across Cultures, the meaning provokes a conditioned emotional response.

Visual Perception

• A classic selective attention experiment, most recently done by Simons and Chabris, features a groups of students, half dressed in black and half in white, passing a basketball back and forth. The instructions are to count how many time the group in white passes the basketball back and forth. Since the group in black is also passing a basketball, this takes some focused attention. As the subject watches the white players intently, trying to count basketball passes, a gorilla passes into the middle of the group, then walks out again. Fully half of the viewers did not even see the gorilla. The experiment demonstrates that when our attention is so selectively focused, we fail to see things that are right in front of us.