Abstract
Selective Attention can be defined as the ability to focus on only one thing. Through selective attention your conscious awareness focuses like a flash light in the dark. An example of selective attention is that you may be at a party hanging out, talking and laughing with some friends, then, above your conversation and all of the background noise your hear someone call your name. Because attention is selective is cause inattention to other things. One of the most common form of selective attention nowadays would be texting. Most high school teenagers text and walk at the same time thus giving teenagers a larger risk at danger. Wit selective attention comes with selective inattention. Selective inattention is when your attention is directed somewhere else and you have inattentional blindness. Another form of inattentional blindness is called change blindness . Change blindness is when something changes right in front of your eyes and you don’t notice the change.
Consciousness and the Two Track Mind
With selective attention we unknowingly ignore things. selective hearing is a way of describing the tendency of some people to ignore things that they don’t want to hear. It is not a physiological condition because they are hearing the words but their minds chose not to acknowledge the words. In many cases the conscious mind does not appear to receive the information, so it is different than an active ignoring of speech. Instead, it is a sort of selective inattention that may be done consciously or subconsciously. (Nosofsky et al. 1997; Lamberts 1998) Usually selective hearing is a trait associated with men. A common example would be a woman asking her male partner whether he wants to go to the opera that night, only to have him seemingly ignore her. However, when she mentions something of interest to him, such as football or beer, he immediately responds as though he had been listening all along. Although these sorts of examples may seem unrealistic, in fact they are not uncommon in everyday interactions between people of all genders and relationships. (Nosofsky et al. 1997; Lamberts 1998).
The Essay on Selective Attention
Selective attention is very important in our daily lives, but we are often unaware of how it really works. Therefore, it is worthy to explore its characteristics and functions, ways to control it and investigation methods. Selective attention, also known as focused attention, mainly controls our awareness of particular categories or entities in our environment. When it is involved, we focus ...
Selective inattention is when we are blind to certain things that we may not notice. (Myers, Davis 2010) Attention is a complex system, and is not well understood, although it is studied at great length. One thing that does appear to be certain is that the degree of attention a person gives is able to shift radically based on circumstances. Certain things appear to command absolute attention, while others seem nearly impossible to focus on. Like when your in a room with your friends laughing and giggling and your trying to study. It will be almost impossible for you to study because you don’t want to. It has more to do with the way one’s mind prioritizes things.
