Information Processing Theories: Attention

Changes in attention have been described by many as the key to changes in human memory (Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Posner & Rothbart, 2007). However, attention is not a unified function; it is comprised of sub-processes. Our ability to focus on a single task or stimulus, while ignoring distracting information, is called selective attention. There is a sharp improvement in selective attention from age six into adolescence (Vakil et al., 2010). Sustained attention is the ability to stay on task for long periods of time. The ability to switch our focus between tasks or external stimuli is called divided attention or multitasking, which also improves into adolescence (Carlson et al., 2013).

Automatic processing is usually done without any conscious awareness. How often do you drive home and can’t remember how you got there? This is an example of automatic processing that does not require you to consciously think about the steps involved in getting home, including how to drive your car and how to get there. Contrast that with driving somewhere unfamiliar. It probably required a lot of work and attention on your part in order to navigate. Perhaps you even turned down the radio so you could focus better. This is known as effortful processing.

There are three types of encoding. The encoding of words and their meaning is known as semantic encoding. It was first demonstrated by William Bousfield (1935) in an experiment in which he asked people to memorize words. The 60 words were actually divided into 4 categories of meaning, although the participants did not know this because the words were randomly presented. When they were asked to remember the words, they tended to recall them in categories, showing that they paid attention to the meanings of the words as they learned them.

Video 7.11 Attention explains the ways in which we may attend or fail to attend to stimuli.

The ability to use selective attention improves through childhood and into adolescence. While children’s selective attention may be inconsistent during middle childhood, adolescents demonstrate the ability to reliably select and prioritize stimuli for attention. The development of this ability is influenced by the child’s temperament (Rothbart & Rueda, 2005), the complexity of the stimulus or task (Porporino et al., 2004), and may be dependent on whether the stimuli are visual or auditory (Guy et al., 2013). Guy et al. (2013) found that children’s ability to selectively attend to visual information outpaced that of auditory stimuli. This may explain why young children are not able to hear the voice of the teacher over the cacophony of sounds in the typical preschool classroom (Jones et al., 2015). Jones and his colleagues found that 4 to 7 year-olds could not filter out background noise, especially when its frequencies were close in sound to the target sound. In comparison, teens often performed similarly to adults.

Video 7.12 Theories of Selective Attention explains how and why we attend to some stimuli and not others.

Most measures of sustained attention typically ask individuals to spend several minutes focusing on one task, while waiting for an infrequent event, while there are multiple distractors for several minutes. Common estimates of the attention span of healthy teenagers and adults range from 10 to 20 minutes. There is some debate as to whether attention is consistently sustained or whether people repeatedly choose to re-focus on the same thing. This ability to renew attention permits people to ‘pay attention’ to things that last for more than a few minutes.

For time-on-task measurements, the type of activity used in the test affects the results, as people are generally capable of a longer attention span when they are doing something that they find enjoyable or intrinsically motivating. Attention is also sustained if the person is able to perform the task fluently, compared to a person who has difficulty performing the task, or to the same person when he or she is just learning the task. Fatigue, hunger, noise, and emotional stress reduce the time focused on the task. After losing attention from a topic, a person may restore it by resting, doing a different kind of activity, changing mental focus, or deliberately choosing to re-focus on the first topic.

Divided attention can be thought of in a couple of ways. We may look at how well people are able to multitask, performing two or more tasks simultaneously, or how people are able to alternate attention between two or more tasks. For example, walking and talking to a friend at the same time is multitasking, where trying to text while driving requires us to quickly alternate attention between two tasks.

Young children (age 3-4) have considerable difficulties in dividing their attention between two tasks, and often perform at levels equivalent to our closest relative, the chimpanzee, but by age five they have surpassed the chimp (Hermann & Tomasello, 2015). Despite these improvements, 5-year-olds continue to perform below the level of school-age children, adolescents, and adults. These skills continue to develop into adolescence.

Regardless of age, we have a limited capacity for attention and the division of attention is confined to that limitation. Our ability to effectively multitask or alternate attention is dependent on the automaticity or complexity of the task, but are also influenced by conditions like anxiety, arousal, task difficulty, and skills. Research shows that when dividing attention, people are more apt to make mistakes or perform their tasks more slowly. Attention must be divided among all of the component tasks to perform them.

Classical research on divided attention involved people performing simultaneous tasks, like reading stories while listening and writing something else, or listening to two separate messages through different ears. Participants were often tested on their ability to learn new information while engaged in multiple tasks. More current research examines the performance of doing two tasks simultaneously, such as driving while performing another task. This research reveals that the human attentional system has limits for what it can process. For examples, driving performance is worse while engaged in other tasks; drivers make more mistakes, brake harder and later, get into more accidents, veer into other lanes, and/or are less aware of their surroundings when engaged in the previously discussed tasks (Collet et al., 2009).

Video 7.13 The Spotlight Model of Attention and Our Ability to Multitask explains how we divide our attention to attend to different tasks or information.