ABSTRACT
Our senses are continuously assailed by multiple inputs from our environment. Attention allows us to concentrate our processing resources onto selected inputs. We use attention to process what we perceive around us and to accomplish every single task of our busy days. In fact, when we do not pay enough attention to what we are doing that often is when mistakes occur. Maybe your coffee mug fell on the floor this morning because you didn’t really pay attention to where you were putting it down (as it turned out, not entirely on the table). Our attention can be active or passive. In the case of active attention, it is a controlled and top-down process by which you direct your attention to a certain goal, such as checking the e-mails on your phone. Passive attention is a bottom-up process whereby the environment triggers an attentional response from you. For example, imagine you are walking down a corridor at work and someone behind you calls your name, which draws your attention and makes you turn around to focus on the person calling out to you. Your attention can also be focused or divided. When your attention is focused (which is also called “selective attention”), it acts like a spotlight that selects a certain element of your environment to process while keeping the rest in the dark. The “cocktail party effect” (Cherry 1953) is an 52example of focused attention: When you are having a conversation with someone in the midst of a loud party, you can focus specifically on what that person is saying while all other conversations are filtered out. By contrast, your attention is divided when you try to focus on two or more elements at the same time (which is more commonly called “multitasking”). For example, your active, top-down, and selective attention allows you to fully focus on what your boss is telling you at a work party. At some point, you hear your name mentioned in a nearby conversation: Your passive, bottom-up, attention triggers you to now also listen to this other conversation because you are curious to know what these people are saying about you. Because you do not want to be rude to your boss, you still try to listen to what she is telling you at the same time, which is a case of divided attention (multitasking). It can be extremely difficult to process two sources of information at the same time. In fact, what happens in that case is that you “flip-flop” your focus from one conversation to the other, hoping to fill in the gaps of what you are missing. If you do not remember the limitations of working memory that we tackled in the previous chapter, let me take this opportunity to offer you a reminder (so that your forgetting curve for that memory can be smoothed out a little bit): This example is a case of working memory directing attentional resources to the phonological loop system because it has two language-processing tasks to complete by itself. This kind of situations triggers a “processing bottleneck,” seriously limiting our ability to process both tasks properly.
