Selective attention

Question 1

Selective attention

Answer 1

Focusing on one stimulus out of many stimuli.
◦ Learning which stimuli must be attended to and which
can be safely ignored allows us to adapt to our environment.
◦ Sudden changes
◦ Unusual stimuli
◦ Intense stimuli
◦ Repetitive stimuli

Question 2

Cocktail party effect (Selective attention)

Answer 2

the brain focuses a person’s attention on a particular stimulus, usually auditory. This focus excludes a range of other stimuli from conscious awareness, as when a partygoer follows a single conversation in a noisy room. it has been proposed that a person’s sensory memory subconsciously parses all stimuli and identifies discrete portions of these sensations
according to their salience.
also describes a phenomenon that occurs when one may immediately detect words of importance originating from unattended stimuli, for instance hearing one’s name among a wide range of auditory input