تسجيل الدخول

تسجيل

ATTENTION1 (SELECTIVE ATTENTION)

المؤلف:  John Field

المصدر:  Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P24

2025-07-28

680

ATTENTION1 (SELECTIVE ATTENTION)

We possess an ability to tune in to certain sources of input and exclude others. There is a classic ‘cocktail party’ effect where a listener can attend to a single person at a large party despite many other (often loud) voices in the room. Yet, when somebody the other side of the room mentions the listener’s name, he/she is immediately aware of it. It seems that we tune in to a particular speaker but that we continue to monitor speech elsewhere at a low level of attention.

 Early work on attention accounted for this with a ‘filter’ theory. We are bombarded with information from the environment (e.g. voices and sounds), but our perceptual system is said to filter out what is not relevant. There was disagreement as to whether the filter was applied:

at the outset, limiting sensory evidence to the voice of the interlocutor;

while the evidence was briefly stored in the mind– picking out the important voice from the others;

after perception– matching all voices to words, but focusing only on the interlocutor’s.

Further reading: Lund (2001); Styles (1997)