How Does Selective Attention Work?

How Does Selective Attention Work?

At any given moment, we are subjected to a constant barrage of sensory information. The blare of a car horn from the street outside; the chatter of your friends; the click of the keys as you type a paper for school; the hum of the heater as it keeps your room warm on a brisk autumn day.

But in most cases, we don't pay attention to each and every one of these sensory experiences. Instead, we center our attention on certain important elements of our environment while other things blend into the background or pass us by completely unnoticed.

So how exactly do we decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore?

Imagine that you are at a party for a friend hosted at a bustling restaurant. Multiple conversations, the clinking of plates and forks, and many other sounds compete for your attention. Out of all these noises, you find yourself able to tune out the irrelevant sounds and focus on the amusing story that your dinner partner shares.

How do you manage to ignore certain stimuli and concentrate on just one aspect of your environment? This is an example of selective attention. Because our ability to attend to the things around us is limited in terms of both capacity and duration, we have to be picky about the things we pay attention to.

Attention acts somewhat like a spotlight, highlighting the details that we need to focus on and casting irrelevant information to the sidelines of our perception.

"In order to sustain our attention to one event in everyday life, we must filter out other events," explains author Russell Revlin in his text Cognition: Theory and Practice.

"We must be selective in our attention by focusing on some events to the detriment of others. This is because attention is like a resource that needs to be distributed to those events that are important."

Source:VeryWell.com