Give examples of situations that illustrate the following:
1. selective attention, distraction, divided attention, attentional capture, and scanning.
2. how was the dichotic listening procedure used to determine how well people can focus on the attended message and how much information can be taken in from the unattended message? what is the cocktail party effect, and what does it demonstrate?
3. describe broadbent’s model of selective attention. why is it called an early selection model?

Explanation:

1. Selective attention is the process of directing our awareness to relevant stimuli while ignoring the irrelevant. For example: when you pay attention to a professor in a class or doing your homework. A distraction defined by the Cambridge dictionary is “the state of being bored or something that prevents someone from giving their attention. For example, cellphones are a distraction when you are in school. Divided attention is when you perform two tasks at the same time. For example: when you watch a movie with subtitles or watch the tv while eating. Attentional capture is when an irrelevant item that is unique in some way affects the time to detect a target. For example: trying to find a seat at the cinema even though your friend is waving at you and you don’t notice. Scanning is reading a text quickly in order to find specific information. For example: A DMV employee needs to scan your information to get the details necessary.

2. The procedure consisted in turning down a volume of either one of the 4 sources that were available; or attenuate 3 in order to attend the fourth one. In the process they found that the participant could process the meaning of attend messages. Also, participants could still be able to identify the context of unattended messages; indicating they could identify both attended and unattended messages. The cocktail party effect is when you focus on a single speaker in any environment, even though the voice is surrounded by other noises. It demonstrated the capability of the human being to understand a speech if they really focus; listening to it and leaving all the distractions behind.

3. The broadbent’s model wanted to see how people were able to focus their attention (selective) by deliberately overloading them with stimuli. One of the ways was to send a message to one ear and a different message to the other. It is called the early selection model because it was one of the pioneers of creating a model who uses selective attention.