Chapter 1. Attentional Filtering

1.1 Introduction

How good are you at ignoring what going on around you? In this task you are asked to follow information presented in one ear (referred to as the attending ear). Your task is to not pay attention to what is going on in your other ear. Try this task to see how you respond to distraction.

1.2 Experiment Setup

1.3 Instructions

You will need to press the space bar to begin the experiment. You will then be presented with 2 three-word phrases simultaneously, one in each ear. You are to attend to what is presented in the ear you chose during set-up to be your attending ear. At the end of the trial, a selection of words will be presented as buttons. Please select, in the order they were presented, the words you heard in the attending ear.

1.4 Experiment

1.5 Results

1.6 Debriefing

It is impossible for us to process all the sources of information that come our way. We have to respond to some events while ignoring others. By and large, and with a remarkable record of success, we are able to select the stimuli that need our attention. This ability is called selective attention. We are not perfect at it, but we do well enough that we do not usually have to actively think about how we accomplish this function. Researchers often study the ways we segment the world so that we can gather the information we need and ignore the information we don’t. One of the first and still most common ways to understand how we select information is based on the channel or the source of the information. In visual terms, the computer window you are reading at this moment is a source or channel of information. If you are paying attention to this window, what is going on within it is kept together and selected. For the most part, you can ignore what is going on beyond the window, including any other areas of the computer screen.

In this experiment, we controlled the channel of information by directing one set of words to one ear and another set of words to the other ear. Your job was to pay attention to the information coming from just one ear. Such simple physical cues are important features by which we can choose to pay attention to one stimulus and ignore others Broadbent (1956). Other simple physical differences have been found useful in helping us select the source of information. If two people are speaking, one with a high-pitched voice and the other with a low-pitched voice, the pitch of the voice can help you distinguish the two people (Triesman, 1964).

Grey and Wedderburn (1960), the experiment being replicated here, asked if something other than mere physical differences influence how we select the information we attend to. They examined whether the meaning of the stimulus can play a role in how we pay attention. Let us look at a sample set of stimuli carefully:

In this example, the participant was asked to listen to the left ear. The participant is to respond: Mice 5 cheese. What Gray and Wedderburn found was that their participants like to group their results by meaning. Several of their participants would report Mice eat cheese. Thus meaning played a role in how we group information for selection and can overrule the need to group by physical location. Such results have played an important role in how we think about how attention selects stimuli to process, suggesting that mere physical aspects of a stimulus, while important, is not the defining feature of attention.

References:

Broadbent, D. E. (1956). Successive responses to simultaneous stimuli. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 8, 145-152.

Gray, J. A. & Wedderburn, A. A. I. (1960). Grouping strategies with simultaneous stimuli. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 180-184.

Triesman, A. (1964). The effect of irrelevant material on the efficiency of selective listening. American Journal of Psychology, 77, 206-214.

1.7 Quiz