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What is the meaning of attention in Psychology?
attention, in psychology, the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli. Attention is the cognitive process that makes it possible to position ourselves towards relevant stimuli and consequently respond to it. This cognitive ability is very important and is an essential function in our daily lives. Luckily, attention can be trained and improved with the appropriate cognitive training. During the course of a single look, infants will cycle through four phases of attention—stimulus orienting, sustained attention, pre-attention termination, and attention termination. The most relevant of these phases are sustained attention and attention termination. At this point in modern psychology, the varying viewpoints on human behavior have been split into eight different perspectives: biological, behavioral, cognitive, humanistic, psychodynamic, sociocultural, evolutionary, and biopsychosocial. Broadbent (1958) developed the first complete model of attention, called Filter Theory (see below).
What are the theories of attention in Psychology?
Attention research attempts to explain how people notice and then make sense of the constant flow of auditory and visual information in the environment. The answer rests in the senses and brain and how people allocate their scarce attentional resources and limited working memories. Selective attention refers to the processes that allow an individual to select and focus on particular input for further processing while simultaneously suppressing irrelevant or distracting information. Selection models of attention theorize how specific stimuli gain our awareness. Early selection models emphasize physical features of stimuli are attended to, while late selection models argue that semantic features are what determine our current focus of attention. Attention can be categorized into three main components depending on their different functions: (a) activation (alertness, sustained attention), (b) visual–spatial orientation (overt attention, visual search), and (c) selective executive components (divided attention, inhibitory control, and flexibility).
What is attention and its types?
There are four different types of attention: selective, or a focus on one thing at a time; divided, or a focus on two events at once; sustained, or a focus for a long period of time; and executive, or a focus on completing steps to achieve a goal. How are Attention Skills Currently Defined? Sustained Attention. The ability to attend to a task for extended periods of time without losing focus or concentration. Selective Attention. The ability to focus and concentrate on a task even when distractions are present. Attentional capacity is the number of items a person can hold in their temporal memory whilst undertaking a task (researchers equivocate this to Random Access Memory in computing hardware). Broadbent is credited with the first model of attention, often described as a “bottleneck theory” because information had to be filtered to restrict the flow to a cognitively manageable amount (Anderson et al., 2002).
What called attention?
Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. Attention is the behavior a person uses to focus the senses, from sight to hearing and even smell. It may focus on information that matters outside of the cab (e.g., signals, traffic), inside the cab (e.g., displays, controls), or on the radio network. Attention to information that is not important is distraction. Attention involves three functionally and neuroanatomically distinct neural networks: alerting, orienting, and executive control. Attention is the important ability to flexibly control limited computational resources. It has been studied in conjunction with many other topics in neuroscience and psychology including awareness, vigilance, saliency, executive control, and learning. Divided attention occurs when mental focus is directed towards multiple ideas, or tasks, at once. This skill is also known as multitasking, which people often carry out without realizing it. In the attention schema theory, awareness does not arise just because the brain integrates information or settles into a network state, any more than the perceptual model of color arises just because information in the visual system becomes integrated or settles into a state.
What is the importance of attention?
Why is attention important? Effective attention is what allows us to screen out irrelevant stimulation in order to focus on the information that is important in the moment. This also means that we are able to sustain attention which then allows us to engage in a task for long enough to repeatedly practice it. Four processes are fundamental to attention: working memory, top-down sensitivity control, competitive selection, and automatic bottom-up filtering for salient stimuli. Each process makes a distinct and essential contribution to attention. The term attention is used for various perceptual processes, which involves selection and inclusion of certain sensory inputs as a part of our conscious experience. The process of attention involves the very act of listening and concentrating on a specific object, topic or event, for fulfilling the desired goals. In particular, “focused attention” depends on the alerting network, “selective attention” involves the executive network, “alternating attention” depends on the “orienting network” (Pozuelos et al., 2014), and “distributed attention,” also called “divided attention,” requires the functioning of each of these networks. There are three models that are associated to selective attention. These are the models of attention by Broadbent, Treisman, and Deutsch and Deutsch. They are also referred to as bottleneck models of attention because they explain how we cannot attend to all sensory input at one time in the conscious level.
What is the source of attention?
Meticulous research over decades has found that the control of this vital ability, called selective attention, belongs to a handful of areas in the brain’s parietal and frontal lobes. Now a new study suggests that another area in an unlikely location—the temporal lobe—also steers the spotlight of attention. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain that helps people to organize, plan, pay attention, and make decisions. Parts of the frontal lobe may mature a few years later in people with ADHD. In both cases, the prefrontal cortex — the control center for most cognitive functions — appears to take charge of the brain’s attention and control relevant parts of the visual cortex, which receives sensory input. The frontal lobe is part of the frontal cortex. It is a part of the brain that plays a role in memory, attention, judgment, and other vital functions. If we look back at what we explained in our previous post, the main difference between the two types of attention previously mentioned is the capability that selective attention gives us to focus on a particular stimulus or activity, independently of any distractors that might also be present. Comprised of four components – selective attention, maintaining focus, situational awareness and adjusting attention – there is tremendous payoff if you make the decision to sharpen your concentration skills.