COGNITIVE
PSYCHOLOGY
NOBEAH C. SABLAWON
Table of contents
01
The Nature of
Attention and
Consciousness
03
Selective
Attention
02
Attending to
Signals over
the Short and
Long Terms
04
Divided
Attention
01
THE NATURE OF
ATTENTION AND
CONCIOUSNESS
Attention
is the means by which we actively process a limited amount of
information from the enormous amount of information available
through our senses, our stored memories, and our other
cognitive processes (De Weerd, 2003a; Rao, 2003).
Consciousness
includes both the feeling of awareness and the content of
awareness, some of which may be under the focus of
attention (Bourguignon, 2000; Farthing, 1992, 2000; Taylor,
2002).
Four main functions of attention
 Signal detection and vigilance
 Search
 Selective attention
 Divided attention
02
ATTENDING TO
SIGNALS OVER
THE SHORT AND
LONG TERMS
Research psychologists must search out from among a
diverse array of items those that are:



Signal Detection
Vigilance, and
Search
Signal Detection: Finding Important
Stimuli in a Crowd
Signal-detection
theory (SDT)
is a framework to explain how people pick out
the few important stimuli when they are
embedded in a wealth of irrelevant, distracting
stimuli.
Vigilance: Waiting to Detect a Signal
Vigilance
refers to a person’s ability to attend to a field of
stimulation over a prolonged period, during which
the person seeks to detect the appearance of a
particular target stimulus of interest
03
SELECTIVE
ATTENTION
Cocktail party
problem
the process of tracking one conversation in the face of the
distraction of other conversations
Theories of Selective Attention





Broadbent’s Model
Selective Filter Model
Attenuation Model
Late-Filter Model
A Synthesis of Early-Filter and Late-Filter
Model
04
DIVIDED
ATTENTION
Theories of Divided Attention

Attentional-resources theory
Thank you!