Attention

When you use your mental activity in order to focus to certain stimuli you use your Attention.

Did you ever drive, talk on your cell phone, and tried to listen to the radio, all in the same time? (OK, you can be honest, I know you did). If you are not the multitasking person from above, I am sure you had at least one incident when you had to do two things at the same time (such as listen to your teacher and text message your friend.... OK, I hope that you did not do this). Each time when we are in situation where we perform or attend to two or more things at the same time we use our Divided attention.
Now if you ask those who drive a car, talk on a cell, put make up, and listen to the radio to their favorite song, all at once; then you find out that "practice makes perfect." Don't think that multitasking is a gift from gods. If you are persistent and well organized, and if you practice long enough the skills, you also can do multitasking.

Remember when you were at a party last time and you were in a group of friends talking, laughing, having fun, and from a corner where another group was talking, across the room, in the noisy chit-chat of everyone, you hear someone spoke your name! Till then you did not even notice that group there in the corner, but now you make efforts to sharpen your hearing and be able to perceive what are they talking about YOU?! This happened because you focused your attention and selected to listen to that group across the room and above all the noise. You used your Selective attention.

People's attention can be distracted sometimes by irrelevant information. James Stroop (135) demonstrated that people need more time to name colors when there were incongruences in the color of the ink and color of the writing. Try to read as fast as you can the words below. Time yourself or have someone time you.




Some researchers explain the Stroop effect by PDP.
Along with the Stroop effect you can try out the McGurk effect. When the image of moving lips does not match (or matches too many) different words. If you would just listen to the sounds the response would be different, but the images of moving lips will distort your expectations, and in consequence your performance on this test.




There are couple of theories that explain attention.

One of the early theories refers to the so called Bottleneck effect. According to this theory we can process and attend only limited amount of information at one time.
Think when you drive in the morning on the high way to school. There are 4 lines and everyone goes nicely with a average good speed of around 60ML/h. But at a sudden there is an accident caused by two cars crashing into each other. Since they are stopped and Police, Fire fighters, and Ambulance attends to their needs, all the traffic slows down. Only two lanes are now used and cars get behind and bumper to bumper and the speed slows down to may be 30 ML/h. All behind this accident is a big mess of cars going slow because there is no enough space (missing two lanes), if you imagine all the scene as it could be seen from the helicopter of those who survey the traffic then you might see something like a bottleneck.... after the accident scene, some speed and number of cars going on the highway are "lost."

Did you ever asked yourself why can you drive a car, listen to your CD player, talk on the cell, and pay attention to the stop lights all at the same time (not talking about putting your make up, text messaging, writing your paper on the laptop, and God knows what else you guys do when driving in the morning to school)? You will tell me that you are good at multitasking. And that is true but it is so because you use automatic processing, and that is a parallel process since you can pay attention to different tasks in parallel.
However, when for example you will write your final exam, or when you learn a new skill, or when you perform a skill that is difficult, it is most likely you will not be able to do all those multi-tasks all at once. That is because you use controlled processing, which is serial, that is you must pay attention one at a time.

Treisman proposed a more complex theory of attention Feature-integration theory based on the idea of distributed attention - using parallel processing, usually a low level processing, this is when you are able of multitasking. The second stage in the feature-integration theory is focused attention - which requires serial attention, for more complex processes, when you must attend to one item at a time.