ABSTRACT
The human brain is confronted with a multitude of inputs: sounds from many sources; tactile sensations from the entire surface of the body; visual inputs from a huge array of retinal receptors; a variety of smells and tastes. Most cognitive psychologists agree that selective attention is used to filter out irrelevant information, allowing cognitive processing resources and behavioral outputs to be concentrated on a small number of relevant sources of information. Many of the early experiments on selective attention were related to the 'cocktail-party effect', the common phenomenon of being unable to understand anything in a room full of people speaking unless attention is focused on one speaker at a time. During the 1960s and early 1970s, several experiments were conducted to determine whether selective attention affects the early sensory evoked response potentials (ERP) components. The visual attention paradigm, subjects fixate a central point and direct attention either to the left visual field (LVF) or the right visual field (RVF).
