What Is Selective Visual Attention?

Selective attention is one of the characteristics of human attention. It is impossible for an individual to pay attention to all the stimuli presented at the same time. He always pays attention to one stimulus selectively while ignoring other stimuli presented at the same time. For example, students in the classroom cannot and should not respond to stimuli that affect their vision and hearing, and normally only focus on the teacher's teaching or presentation. According to cognitive learning theory, the object pointed to by selective attention is affected by the individual's original cognitive structure, so the attention process is an active process. ^[1]

Selective attention means that only a few stimuli or certain aspects of stimuli are noticed in many external stimuli, while other stimuli are ignored. In a sense, the word attention itself has a selective meaning, so the word is redundant. However, its synthetic form is still often used for emphasis.

Human senses may receive a large number of stimuli at all times, and perception does not respond to all stimuli. The selective retention of consciousness ensures that people can focus on important stimuli or important aspects of stimuli, eliminate the interference of secondary stimuli, and more effectively perceive and adapt to the external environment.

Early research on selective attention usually involved binaural presentation of the material. Participants wore stereo headphones, and different information was entered into each ear. Tell the subject to pay attention to only one ear and ensure that the instruction is followed: ask the subject to follow the ear. Following (shadowing) means paying attention to your ears, listening to the information, and repeating it as loudly as possible after listening. Assuming that the subject does not make mistakes when following the ear of attention, this technique seems to be an effective way to ensure selective attention to information. Cherry (1953) used the binaural listening program to find that it was clear that the subjects had almost no difficulty using the follow-up technique, and they made almost no mistakes when following the ear. Participants were able to accurately report whether the non-attentional information was a person's voice or noise, as well as whether the voice was male or female, especially in pitch. In other words, the angel appears to have knowledge about the meaning of non-attention information. ^[2]

For a long time, people's research on the problem of attention in psychology mainly focused on whether the selective effect of attention occurred in the early stage of consciousness or in the late stage of consciousness. For many years, people have not reached a consensus on this issue. So far, there are still differences in understanding of these issues in the psychology community. Researchers have disputed whether the location of processing bottlenecks is early or late in processing. In recent years, there have been many experimental studies in psychology in support of early selection theory. But at the same time, some studies have concluded that the selectivity of attention occurs in the late stages of perception.