Outline and evaluate one 'early selection theory' (Broadbent or Treisman) and one 'late selection theory' (Deutsch) in focused attention.

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Outline and evaluate one 'early selection theory' (Broadbent or Treisman) and one 'late selection theory' (Deutsch) in focused attention.

One early explanation of focused attention was put forward by Broadbent. He devised a model explaining that two messages are sent to two channels, these are being the ears that represent two separate channels. Both messages are sent to the sensory buffer store. This is only a short time before the information is lost. One of the messages which have been attended goes through on the basis of physical characteristics through the filter. A channel has been selected and the bottleneck which the filter is often seen as, occurs here. The filter stops the overload of information piling on the attentional system. According to Broadbent these channels cannot be switched. The unattended message is left in the sensory buffer store and is completely lost.

Key research was conducted by Broadbent on the filter model of attention. His split-span procedure involved participants having to recall digits presented to them in each ear simultaneously. It was seen that ear by ear reports were more accurate. Broadbent stated that the ears operate on separate channels which can only be attended serially. Cherry conducted a few studies into the cocktail party effect where everyone has the ability to follow just one conversation when there are many other ones going on at the same time nearby. Participants had to undergo a dichotic listening task. Cherry found that people could not recall that much from the unattended ear. This means they could not recall any words. They were unaware of the language change during the task. There were physical characteristics that were recognised such as change in volume, pitch and sex of the speaker.

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One advantage of this approach was that it can be experimentally tested. Also this model could explain Cherry’s findings in that the non shadowed messages were not allowed to pass through the filter.

However there are studies producing inconsistent data according to Broadbent’s theory. According to Broadbent, the unattended messages cannot be recalled in terms of the meaning. Our attention may sometimes switch when we here our name in a nearby conversation. This was experimentally conducted by Moray who found that the non attended ear may switch to the attended ear. This shows that there could be semantic analysis ...

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