FACTORS AFFECTING ATTENTION:

Attention :
In Psychology, the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the
exclusion of other stimuli.
Attention is awareness of the here and now in a focal and perceptive way. For
early psychologists, such as Edward Bradford Tetchier, attention determined
the content of consciousness and influenced the quality of conscious
experience. In subsequent years less emphasis was placed on the subjective
element of consciousness and more on the behavior patterns by which
attention could be recognized in others. Although human experience is
determined by the way people direct their attention, it is evident that they
do not have complete control over such direction. There are, for example,
times when an individual has difficulty concentrating attention on a task, a
conversation, or a set of events. At other times an individuals attention is
captured by an unexpected event rather than voluntarily directed toward
it.
Attention, then, may be understood as a condition of selective awareness
which governs the extent and quality of ones interactions with ones
environment. It is not necessarily held under voluntary control. Some of the
history of attention and the methods by which psychologists and others have
come to characterize and understand it are presented in the discussion that
follows.

Early views on attention

19th-century roots:
Psychologists began to study attention in the latter part of the 19th century.
Before this time, philosophers had typically considered attention within the
context of apperception (the mechanism by which new ideas became

associated with existing ideas). Thus Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz suggested

that ones loss of awareness of the constant sound of a waterfall illustrates
how events can cease to be apperceived (that is, represented in
consciousness) without specific attention. He suggested that attention
determines what will and will not be apperceived. The term apperception was
still employed in the 19th century by Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founders of
modern psychology. Wundt, however, was among the first to point out the
distinction between the focal and more general features of human
awareness. He wrote of the wide field of awareness (which he called
the Brickfield) within which lay the more limited focus of attention
(the Blickpunkt). He suggested that the range of the Blickpunkt was about
six items or groups. He also speculated that attention is a function of the
frontal lobes of the brain.
1950s
to
present
In the 1950s, research psychologists renewed their interest in attention when
the dominant epistemology shifted from positivism to realism during what
has come to be known as the cognitive revolution (Hare, 2002). The
cognitive revolution admitted unobservable cognitive processes like
attention as legitimate objects of scientific study.
Colin Cherry and Donald Broadbent, among others, performed experiments
on dichotic listening. In a typical experiment, subjects would listen to two
streams of words in different ears of a set of headphones, and selectively
attend to one stream. After the task, the experimenter would ask the
subjects questions about the content of the unattended stream.
In the 1990s, neuroscientists began using FMRI to image the brain in
attentive tasks. The results of these experiments have shown a broad
agreement with the psychophysical and monkey literature.

Aspects of attention
Selective attention:
Is an individual able to attend to more than one thing at a time? There is
little dispute that human beings and other animals selectively attend to
some of the information available to them at the expense of the remainder.
One reason advanced for this is the limited capacity of the brain, which

cannot process all available information simultaneously, yet everyday

experience shows that people are able to do several things at the same time.
When driving an automobile, they can apparently watch the road, turn the
steering wheel, change gears, and apply the brakes simultaneously if
necessary. This is not to say, however, that people attend to all these
activities simultaneously. It may be that only one of them, such as the road
or its traffic, is at the forefront of awareness, while the others are dealt with
relatively automatically. Another kind of evidence indicates that when two
stimuli are presented at the same time, often only one is perceived while the
other is completely ignored. In those instances when both are perceived, the
responses made to them tend to be in succession, not together.

The Intensity of Attention:

These theories have been criticized for dealing with only the passive aspects
of attentioncertainly there is more to attention than mere selection. Such
critics point out that there is also the question of the degree or intensity with
which attention is applied to a particular task or situation. These intensive
aspects of attention may be regarded as a subset of the broader dimension
of arousal; that is to say, they relate to the continuum of awareness that
extends from sleep (or even coma) to alert wakefulness. The topic of arousal
is discussed later; for the present it is sufficient to note that the level of
arousal can be determined by the demands of the task or activity in which
the individual is engaged or by internal states; these are sometimes
manifested as instinctive drives and frequently accompanied by high
emotions, ranging from keen excitement to unpleasant stress. In the case of
some drive states, the high arousal may be directed to the satisfaction of a
particular need. The consequences for attention can be the allocation of a
high priority, or weighting, to all stimuli that relate to satisfaction of the
need.
In recent years the direction of attention in response to task demands has
often been spoken of in terms of the deployment of mental effort. The
implication is that the intensive aspects of attention correspond to effort
rather than just wakefulness. Effort, like arousal, is subject to task demands
and available capacity. It is regarded as being mobilized in response to such

demands, although the degree of voluntary control of effort is limited. Effort

is not simply to be equated with the amount of work required by a task.
Much mental activity takes place without the investment of a large amount
of conscious effort.

Memory and habituation:

Attempts to accommodate the selective and intensive aspects of attention
and its links with both awareness and more automatic processes have led to
the formulation of a number of two-process theories of attention. One of
the most influential was that advanced by the American
psychologists Richard M. Schifrin and Walter Schneider in 1977 on the basis
of experiments involving visual search. Their theory of detection, search, and
attention distinguishes between two modes of processing
information: controlled search and automatic detection. Controlled search is
highly demanding of attentional capacity and is usually serial in nature. It is
easily established and is largely under the individuals control in that it can
be readily altered or even reversed. It is strongly dependent on the stimulus
load. It has been suggested that it uses short-term memory. By
contrast, automatic detection, or automatic processing, operates in longterm memory and is dependent upon extensive learning. It comes into
operation without active control or attention by the individual, it is difficult to
alter or suppress, and it is virtually unaffected by load.
The process of habituation occurs when a persons response to novelty
wanes with the repeated and regular presentation of the same signal.
Habituation represents a progressive loss of behavioral responsively to a
stimulus as its lack of adaptive significance is recognized. The unchanging
repetition of the signal facilitates this recognition and confirms the
inappropriateness of deploying further attention upon the signal. Generally, a
shorter time interval between signals means a more rapid drop in
responsiveness. If, however, the signals hold special significance for the
individual, they will continue to be attended to and responded to even
though they may be repetitive. For example, a person who counts the ticks
of the clock to check its accuracy will not become habituated to the ticking
sound. In other circumstances where stimuli have special signal properties,
habituation may take place but only very slowly. Other factors, such as
loudness, brightness, or intensity, can affect the magnitude of response to a
signal and the rate at which habituation takes place. Although response

enhancement and resistance to habituation are associated with increased

stimulus intensity, they can also occur in reaction to faint signals. These
observations of changes in attention with time and signal properties raise the
wider question of how attention behaves over long periods of time.

Sustained Attention:
Vigilance:
Sustained attention, or vigilance, as it is more often called, refers to the state
in which attention must be maintained over time. Often this is to be found in
some form of watch keeping activity when an observer, or listener, must
continuously monitor a situation in which significant, but usually infrequent
and unpredictable, events may occur. An example would be watching a radar
screen in order to make the earliest possible detection of a blip that might
signify the approach of an aircraft or ship. It is especially difficult to detect
infrequent signals of this nature.
Vigilance is difficult to sustain. No single theory explains vigilance
satisfactorily, probably because of its complexity. In the first place, there is a
distinction between sustaining attention in a detection task, where the
overall workload is high, and sustaining it when little is happening except for
the occasional looked-for events. Under both conditions performance can
decline over time. Much depends on the allocation of neural resources to
deal with the task. These resources are somewhat limited by the processing
capacity already mentioned. When the task is complex, detection difficult,
time limited, and a series of decisions required using variable data, the brain
may not succeed in coping. Long, boring, and for the most part uneventful
tasks result in lowered performance with regard to both speed and accuracy
in detecting looked-for events. If the task is interesting or is taking place in a
stimulating environment, the individual will be better able to sustain
attention and maintain performance.