Attention can be defined as the concentrated direction of the mind. We can also improve and develop it in our struggle to grasp the best possible understanding of the world around us so as to exploit it to our best interest. Without the aptitude of attention the amount of information available in the environment would be infinite. For example when someone is faced with a life-threatening situation one needs to be economical in dealing with the information arriving at his/her senses. Even in normal circumstances our environment is a buzz of chaos, and we need to select from many different events those to which we should attend in any given moment. Selective attention provides the means by which we reduce the workload on our mental systems. The restriction of mental processing to one event at a time is called selective attention. Our ability to attend the one main event whilst being remotely conscious of the others provides the psychologist with the paradox of how attention can be both a selective and a divided process simultaneously.Cherry in 1953 (sited in Eysenk, 2000), gave subjects a dichotic listening task to perform. This involved wearing a stereo headphone, which enabled the experimenter to present one message to one ear and a second message to the other ear. However what interested Cherry was how much of the unattended channel was only analysed by the subject at a very primitive level. For instance the subject was aware of the sex of the speaker but had no awareness of the context of the message. Cherry concluded that the unattended channel was analysed for its physical properties, such as tone and pitch, but nothing deeper than that.Broadbent (1959; sited in Eysenk, 2000) devised a model to explain how he believed attention is controlled by a filter. This simplified version of Broadbents theory shows that information that becomes filtered out of the system will receive only a low level of analysis. This systems explains much o...
