Module 8: Theories of Attention

Exams are just around the corner, and Perry is buckling down to get some last-minute studying.
He opens his laptop while on the couch. It's quiet. I'll probably focus better with a little
background noise; he thinks to himself. He turns on the show he is currently binging, then
returns to his laptop, plugs a headphone from his computer into his left ear, and pulls up a
lecture video. He begins watching the lecture, but after a few minutes he hears something
exciting happening in the TV show. He looks up at the TV and watches the action unfold. He
then realizes he has no idea what was just said in the lecture video. He tracks back to the last
place he remembers listening. He watches the lecture for a few more minutes, but his eyes
keep shifting back to the TV show. Wait, what did my professor just say? Then, Perry hears a
tone from his cellphone alerting him he has an unread text message. It's from his friend Terry.
He reads the message and, once again, realizes he doesn't know what was said in the lecture or
what just happened in the show. After 20 minutes of 'studying' Perry realizes he's really only
made it five minutes into the lecture video. Why can't Perry pay attention to all of these things
at the same time?

We use the term “attention” all the time, but what processes or abilities does that concept
really refer to? This chapter will focus on how attention allows us to select certain parts of our
environment and ignore other parts, and what happens to the ignored information. A key
concept is the idea that we are limited in how much we can do at any one time. So, we will also
consider what happens when someone tries to do several things at once, such as driving while
using electronic devices.

What is Attention?

Before we begin exploring attention in its various forms, take a moment to consider how you
think about the concept. How would you define attention, or how do you use the term? We
certainly use the word very frequently in our everyday language: “ATTENTION! USE ONLY AS
DIRECTED!” warns the label on the medicine bottle, meaning be alert to possible danger. “Pay
attention!” pleads the weary seventh-grade teacher, not warning about danger (with possible
exceptions, depending on the teacher) but urging the students to focus on the task at hand. We
may refer to a child who is easily distracted as having an attention disorder, although we also
are told that Americans have an attention span of about 8 seconds, down from 12 seconds in
2000, suggesting that we all have trouble sustaining concentration for any amount of time
(from www.Statisticbrain.com). How that number was determined is not clear from the Web
site, nor is it clear how attention span in the goldfish—9 seconds!—was measured, but the fact
that our average span reportedly is less than that of a goldfish is intriguing, to say the least.

William James wrote extensively about attention in the late 1800s. An often quoted passage
(James, 1890/1983) beautifully captures how intuitively obvious the concept of attention is,
while it remains very difficult to define in measurable, concrete terms:

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in
clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible
objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are
of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal
effectively with others. (pp. 381–382) -William James

Notice that this description touches on the conscious nature of attention, as well as the notion
that what is in consciousness is often controlled voluntarily but can also be determined by
events that capture our attention. Implied in this description is the idea that we seem to have a
limited capacity for information processing, and that we can only attend to or be consciously
aware of a small amount of information at any given time.

Many aspects of attention have been studied in the field of psychology. In some respects, we
define different types of attention by the nature of the task used to study it. For example, a
crucial issue in World War II was how long an individual could remain highly alert and accurate
while watching a radar screen for enemy planes, and this problem led psychologists to study
how attention works under such conditions. When watching for a rare event, it is easy to allow
concentration to lag. This continues to be a challenge today for TSA agents, charged with
looking at images of the contents of your carry-on items in search of knives, guns, or shampoo
bottles larger than 3 oz. Attention in the context of this type of search task refers to the level of
sustained attention or vigilance one can maintain. In contrast, divided attention tasks allow us
to determine how well individuals can attend to many sources of information at once. Spatial
attention refers specifically to how we focus on one part of our environment and how we move
attention to other locations in the environment. These are all examples of different aspects of
attention, but an implied element of most of these ideas is the concept of selective attention;
some information is attended to while other information is intentionally blocked out. This
chapter will focus on important issues in selective and divided attention, addressing these
questions:

 Can we pay attention to several sources of information at once, or do we have a limited

capacity for information?
 How do we select what to pay attention to?
 What happens to information that we try to ignore?
 Can we learn to divide attention between multiple tasks?

Selective Attention

Selective attention is the ability to select certain stimuli in the environment to process, while
ignoring distracting information. One way to get an intuitive sense of how attention works is to
consider situations in which attention is used. A party provides an excellent example for our
purposes. Many people may be milling around, there is a dazzling variety of colors and sounds
and smells, the buzz of many conversations is striking. There are so many conversations going
on; how is it possible to select just one and follow it? You don’t have to be looking at the person
talking; you may be listening with great interest to some gossip while pretending not to hear.
However, once you are engaged in conversation with someone, you quickly become aware that
you cannot also listen to other conversations at the same time. You also are probably not aware
of how tight your shoes feel or of the smell of a nearby flower arrangement. On the other hand,
if someone behind you mentions your name, you typically notice it immediately and may start
attending to that (much more interesting) conversation. This situation highlights an interesting
set of observations. We have an amazing ability to select and track one voice, visual object, etc.,
even when a million things are competing for our attention, but at the same time, we seem to
be limited in how much we can attend to at one time, which in turn suggests that attention is
crucial in selecting what is important. How does it all work?

Dichotic Listening Studies

This cocktail party scenario is the quintessential example of selective attention, and it is
essentially what some early researchers tried to replicate under controlled laboratory
conditions as a starting point for understanding the role of attention in perception (e.g., Cherry,
1953; Moray, 1959). In particular, they used dichotic listening and shadowing tasks to evaluate
the selection process. Dichotic listening simply refers to the situation when two messages are
presented simultaneously to an individual, with one message in each ear. In order to control
which message the person attends to, the individual is asked to repeat back or “shadow” one of
the messages as he hears it. For example, let’s say that a story about a camping trip is
presented to John’s left ear, and a story about Abe Lincoln is presented to his right ear. The
typical dichotic listening task would have John repeat the story presented to one ear as he
hears it. Can he do that without being distracted by the information in the other ear? Or,
consider Perry's situation. Can he remember what is being said in the lecture while listening to
the dialogue in a TV show?

People can become pretty good at the shadowing task, and they can easily report the content
of the message that they attend to. But what happens to the ignored message? Typically,
people can tell you if the ignored message was a man’s or a woman’s voice, or other physical
characteristics of the speech, but they cannot tell you what the message was about. In fact,
many studies have shown that people in a shadowing task were not aware of a change in the
language of the message (e.g., from English to German; Cherry, 1953), and they didn't even
notice when the same word was repeated in the unattended ear more than 35 times (Moray,
1959)! Only the basic physical characteristics, such as the pitch of the unattended message,
could be reported.
On the basis of these types of experiments, it seems that we can answer the first question
about how much information we can attend to very easily: not very much. We clearly have a
limited capacity for processing information for meaning, making the selection process all the
more important. The question becomes: How does this selection process work?

Models of Selective Attention

Broadbent’s Filter Model. Many researchers have investigated how selection occurs and what
happens to ignored information. Donald Broadbent was one of the first to try to characterize
the selection process. His Filter Model was based on the dichotic listening tasks described
above as well as other types of experiments (Broadbent, 1958). He found that people select
information on the basis of physical features: the sensory channel (or ear) that a message was
coming in, the pitch of the voice, the color or font of a visual message. People seemed vaguely
aware of the physical features of the unattended information but had no knowledge of the
meaning. As a result, Broadbent argued that selection occurs very early, with no additional
processing for the unselected information. A flowchart of the model might look like Figure 4.1
below.

Figure 4. 1: This figure shows information going in both the left and right ears. Some basic sensory
information, such as pitch, is processed, but the filter only allows the information from one ear to be
processed further. Only the information from the left ear is transferred to short-term memory (STM) and
conscious awareness, and then further processed for meaning. That means that the ignored information
never makes it beyond a basic physical analysis. Friedrich, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Broadbent’s model makes sense, but if you think about it, you already know that it cannot
account for all aspects of the Cocktail Party Effect. What doesn’t fit? The fact is that you tend to
hear your own name when it is spoken by someone, even if you are deeply engaged in a
conversation. We mentioned earlier that people in a shadowing experiment were unaware of a
word in the unattended ear that was repeated many times—and yet many people noticed their
own name in the unattended ear even it occurred only once.

Treisman's Attenuation Model. Anne Treisman (1960) carried out a number of dichotic
listening experiments in which she presented two different stories to the two ears. As usual,
she asked people to shadow the message in one ear. As the stories progressed, however, she
switched the stories to the opposite ears. Treisman found that individuals spontaneously
followed the story, or the content of the message, when it shifted from the left ear to the right
ear. Then they realized they were shadowing the wrong ear and switched back.

Results like this, and the fact that you tend to hear meaningful information even when you
aren’t paying attention to it (like the cocktail part effect illustrated earlier), suggest that we do
monitor the unattended information to some degree on the basis of its meaning. Therefore, the
filter theory can’t be right to suggest that unattended information is completely blocked at the
sensory analysis level. Instead, Treisman suggested that selection starts at the physical or
perceptual level, but that the unattended information is not blocked completely, it is just
weakened or attenuated. As a result, highly meaningful or pertinent information in the
unattended ear will get through the filter for further processing at the level of meaning. The
figure below shows information going in both ears, and in this case there is no filter that
completely blocks nonselected information. Instead, selection of the left ear information
strengthens that material, while the nonselected information in the right ear is weakened.
However, if the preliminary analysis shows that the nonselected information is especially
pertinent or meaningful (such as your own name), then the Attenuation Control will instead
strengthen the more meaningful information.
Figure 4. 2: Treisman's attenuation model of attention. Information from the unattended input is
reduced, but not fully blocked. Friedrich, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Late Selection Models

Other selective attention models have been proposed as well. A late selection or response
selection model proposed by Deutsch and Deutsch (1963) suggests that all information in the
unattended ear is processed on the basis of meaning, not just the selected or highly pertinent
information. However, only the information that is relevant for the task response gets into
conscious awareness. This model is consistent with ideas of subliminal perception; in other
words, that you don’t have to be aware of or attending a message for it to be fully processed
for meaning.

Figure 4. 3: Late selection theory. Both streams are analyzed for meaning before an input source is
selected. Friedrich, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

You might notice that this figure looks a lot like that of the Early Selection model—only the
location of the selective filter has changed, with the assumption that analysis of meaning occurs
before selection occurs, but only the selected information becomes conscious.
Multimode Model

Why did researchers keep coming up with different models? Because no model really seemed
to account for all the data, some of which indicates that nonselected information is blocked
completely, whereas other studies suggest that it can be processed for meaning. The
multimode model addresses this apparent inconsistency, suggesting that the stage at which
selection occurs can change depending on the task. Johnston and Heinz (1978) demonstrated
that under some conditions, we can select what to attend to at a very early stage and we do not
process the content of the unattended message very much at all. Analyzing physical
information, such as attending to information based on whether it is a male or female voice, is
relatively easy; it occurs automatically, rapidly, and doesn’t take much effort. Under the right
conditions, we can select what to attend to on the basis of the meaning of the messages.
However, the late selection option—processing the content of all messages before selection—is
more difficult and requires more effort. The benefit, though, is that we have the flexibility to
change how we deploy our attention depending upon what we are trying to accomplish, which
is one of the greatest strengths of our cognitive system.

This discussion of selective attention has focused on experiments using auditory material, but
the same principles hold for other perceptual systems as well. Neisser (1979) investigated some
of the same questions with visual materials by superimposing two semi-transparent video clips
and asking viewers to attend to just one series of actions. As with the auditory materials,
viewers often were unaware of what went on in the other clearly visible video. Twenty years
later, Simons and Chabris (1999) explored and expanded these findings using similar techniques
and triggered a flood of new work in an area referred to as inattentional blindness.

Divided Attention

In spite of the evidence of our limited attention capacity, we all like to think that we can do
several things at once. Some people claim to be able to multitask without any problem: reading
a textbook while watching television and talking with friends; talking on the phone while
playing computer games; texting while driving. The fact is that we sometimes can seem to
juggle several things at once, but the question remains whether dividing attention in this way
impairs performance.

Is it possible to overcome the limited capacity that we experience when engaging in cognitive
tasks? We know that with extensive practice, we can acquire skills that do not appear to require
conscious attention. As we walk down the street, we don’t need to think consciously about
what muscle to contract in order to take the next step. Indeed, paying attention to automated
skills can lead to a breakdown in performance, or “choking” (e.g., Beilock & Carr, 2001). But
what about higher level, more mentally demanding tasks: Is it possible to learn to perform two
complex tasks at the same time?

Divided Attention Tasks

In a classic study that examined this type of divided attention task, two participants were
trained to take dictation for spoken words while reading unrelated material for comprehension
(Spelke, Hirst, & Neisser, 1976). In divided attention tasks such as these, each task is evaluated
separately, in order to determine baseline performance when the individual can allocate as
many cognitive resources as necessary to one task at a time. Then performance is evaluated
when the two tasks are performed simultaneously. A decrease in performance for either task
would suggest that even if attention can be divided or switched between the tasks, the
cognitive demands are too great to avoid disruption of performance. (We should note here that
divided attention tasks are designed, in principle, to see if two tasks can be carried out
simultaneously. A related research area looks at task switching and how well we can switch
back and forth among different tasks [e.g., Monsell, 2003]. It turns out that switching itself is
cognitively demanding and can impair performance.)

The focus of the Spelke et al. (1976) study was whether individuals could learn to perform two
relatively complex tasks concurrently, without impairing performance. The participants
received plenty of practice—the study lasted 17 weeks and they had a 1-hour session each day,
5 days a week. These participants were able to learn to take dictation for lists of words and read
for comprehension without affecting performance in either task, and the authors suggested
that perhaps there are not fixed limits on our attentional capacity. However, changing the tasks
somewhat, such as reading aloud rather than silently, impaired performance initially, so this
multitasking ability may be specific to these well-learned tasks. Indeed, not everyone could
learn to perform two complex tasks without performance costs (Hirst, Neisser, & Spelke, 1978),
although the fact that some can is impressive.

It should be clear - both from selective attention and divided attention tasks - that attention is
closely related to the amount of mental effort a task commands. The more effort needed to
successfully do something, the more attention is needed. Most people can successfully walk
next to a friend and have a conversation without stumbling or struggling to follow what their
companion is saying because both tasks (walking and conversing) are highly practiced, do not
compete for similar cognitive resources, and require little effort. When a combination of tasks
(like actively listening to a lecture while also actively watching a TV show) require too much
effort, it is much more difficult to perform those tasks simultaneously.

Observations like this led to conceptualizations of attention as the directing of mental

resources. For example, Kahneman (1973) proposed a model that conceptualized attention as
the mental capacity to perform tasks, that that capacity is finite (limited). In this model, people
can do multiple tasks just fine, so long as the combined effort of the tasks do not exceed
attentional capacity. Once that capacity is reached, performance declines substantially. Wickens
(2008) expanded on this notion by segmenting attention into multidimensional resources, each
with their own capacities. This multiple-resource approach better accounts for how people are
able to simultaneously do tasks that don't require the same resources easily (like walking and
talking) while tasks that require the same resources quickly interfere with each other (listening
to a lecture and a TV show at the same time).
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OER Sources and License

 Friedrich, F. (2021). Attention. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds), Noba textbook

series: Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF publishers. Retrieved from
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