In: Psychology
A dog barks outside my window as I sleep, but I do not wake up. My wife then whispers my name and I wake up with a start. Why does this happen?
This example is an illustration of the concept of selective attention. Selective attention, according to Broadbent happens because information from all the stimuli enters a sensory buffer. Then, on the bias of the physical characteristics of that stimuli, it is processed and passed through a filter, so that information overload does not happen.The stimuli which is not filtered, eventually decays, and the other information is attended to.
This means that we selectively choose pay attention to some
environmental stimuli while ignoring other stimuli. We choose to
attend to important information and ignore information which is not
important or useless. The cocktail party phenomenon further
explains this concept. It says that, in a cocktail party there are
several sounds, but we tend to ignore them, but when someone calls
out our name, we hear it clearly. This happens because we have
developed the ability to attend to important stimuli and screen out
all the unimportant ones.