Is attention merely a matter of selection?
Is attention merely a matter of selection? Attention is "the act of concentration on any one of a set of any subjects or thoughts". (Collins dictionary). Selective attention is "the process by which a person can selectively pick out one message from a mixture of messages occurring simultaneously" (Collins dictionary). As the two definitions suggest, only in the case of selective attention the person selects where to direct his attention. But attention is not always selective; it is often automatic, instinctual, conditioned or biased. This essay rejects the statement that "attention is merely a matter of selection" by looking at several attentional processes in which no selection takes place. It is structured as follows: First it looks at selective attention. It then examines the role automatic attention plays in divided attention. Following that it will determine the hindering effects that instinctual attention, conditioned attention and attentional biases have on being able to selectively attend to something. Finally it presents disciplines, in which increased control over the capability to use selective attention is sought after. It concludes that although in some situations selective attention is applied, in most situations what people attend to is determined by automatic attention, conditioned attention, instinctive attention and attentional biases. Selective
Are people rational?
Are people rational? The idea that "man is a rational animal" goes back to Aristotle, and rationality has often been described as a defining human trait. However, humans can also act irrationally and many researchers have demonstrated our faulty reasoning habits. To reconcile these conflicting viewpoints, we need a clear understanding of what 'rationality' refers to. 'Following the laws of formal logic' is one way of defining rationality, but as we shall see later, this is not the only way, and probability theory provides an alternative normative theory of rationality to logic that seems to work better on a descriptive level of how we actually reason too. Taking formal logic as a starting point for defining rationality, there has been much research showing that people often use faulty logic on reasoning tasks, indicating that they are not very rational. For example, Marcus & Rips (1979) found that participants presented with conditional rules (of the format "If A, then B") often made illogical inferences, such as inferring A from the presence of B (affirmation of the consequent) or when told A is false, inferring that B is false also (denial of the antecedent). These invalid inferences were not endorsed by participants as often as valid inferences were, but were still endorsed 20-30% of the time, rather than the expected 0% if participants were making entirely rational