William James (1890): “everyone knows what attention is. It is the
possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems
several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts. Focalization,
concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from
something in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition called “distraction” in French and “zerstreuhiet” in German.”
This definition of attention given 124 years earlier
might apparently seem to clearly and distinctly define attention. It was until cognitive revolution during 1950s that the definition started to seem
incompetent to the aspects and approaches of attention. After which different
psychologists started to work on attention experimentally and to define it. Solso defined it as, “ the
concentration of mental effort on sensory or mental efforts”. Here, Solso does not forget the mental
focusing on stimuli. Titchner was
the first to start experiment on attention. He rather used the term “
attensity” to explain an attribute of sensory experience comparable to hue or
loudness. He realized the importance when he says that the doctrine of
attention is the nerve of the whole psychological system. Although many
scientists have made effort to define attention, there has been a reluctancy in
defining due to a bunch of reasons. Primary reason is that visual attention is
different to auditory which is different from tactual or olfactory attention. Immense work has been done on the former two than the latter two. The other
reasons are the conflict in nature of attention. Lets take a look on the nature
of attention now.
Lets take an example, at a party I ask everyone to pay
attention to the stage where a cake is about to be brought by the hostess.
While you are looking at the stage you are expecting a cake, with our past
experience we know what a cake looks like, how it tastes. Here. Our attention
is space based
as
we are looking at the stage. Suddenly then a chandelier falls from the ceiling,
now your attention is no more towards the stage but rather on the chandelier.
This is object based
attention.
By the same example, we also learn two approaches of attention. When we were
paying attention to the stage it was a top-down
process,
we had expectations to what we are going to attend. Whereas when the chandelier
fell our attention was bottom-up
as we were not expecting it and was rather sudden.(top-down and bottom-up
processes will be discussed in the next post)
If we start thinking about the nature of attention then
preliminarily we might be satisfied by thinking it as a resource. Attention is
something that helps us focus on a few (often important) stimuli from among the
myriad of stimuli that surrounds us at any given time. Attention is the gateway
to higher cognitive processes. In his book, Perception
and Communication, Broadbent said
that attention is the result of a limited capacity information processing
system. Another notable aspect of attention that also proves it being resource
is that with practice less attention or mental effort is required to do the
same act. I also believe that this nature of attention has evolutionary traces
of human being. We must always be able enough to select important stimuli to
attend to from the unwanted once. The top-down approach of attention would have
helped our ancestors to detect unusual and primarily harmful stimuli and survive
in the environment.
