What is attention?

Made by @agreyr

Selective attention

Process by which we select or focus on one or more stimuli for enhanced processing and analysis

Vigilance

A global level of alertness of the individual

Overt attention

Attention in which the focus coincides with sensory orientation

Covert attention

Attention in which the focus can be directed independently of sensory orientation

Cocktail party effect

Selective enhancement of attention in order to filter out distractions

Attentional bottleneck

Attention acts as a filter so our resources are directed to what is MOST important

Early selection models (when does this bottleneck occur?)

Unattended information is filtered out right away, at the level of sensory input; the meaning is not yet processed and the filter only lets through information based on physical characteristics of the information

Late selection models (when does this bottleneck occur?)

All incoming stimuli are processed for meaning before any selection occurs for attention; no feature-based filtering occurs