PSYB57H3 Chapter 4: Chapter 4. Paying Attention

61 views2 pages
16 Feb 2011
School
Department
Course
Professor

Document Summary

Selective attention: the focusing of cognitive resources on one or a small number of tasks to the exclusion of others. Dichotic listening task: a task in which a person hears two or more different, specially recorded messages over earphones and is asked to attend to one of them. Sometimes the tapes are recorded so that both messages are heard in both ears - called binaural presentation. Filter theory: a theory of attention proposing that information that exceeds the capacity of a processor to process at any given time is blocked from further processing. Based on some physical aspect of the attended message: the location of its source and its typical pitch or loudness. In other words, the filter selects information for later processing. Protects us from information overload by shutting out messages when we hear too much information to process all at once.