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Attention

Attention is the behavior a person uses to focus the senses, from sight to hearing and even smell. Attention to information that is not important is distraction. As humans we have to think of attention as a limited resource. There are many forms of attention but all involve the use of sight and or hearing.

Attention and Sight
Our eyes are what we use to perceive the world, we are constantly making eye and body movements. Without eye movements we would not be able to process all of our visual field. When studied in a lab people respond 20 milliseconds faster when they are cued. In the natural world it takes longer for people to respond due to outside distractions or movements. When the target or you are moving your eyes are processing that stimuli in a process called remapping. Our brain naturally wants to keep our surrounding stable. If you become so focused on one stimuli we can experience something called inattentional blindness researched by Arien Mack and Irvic Rock in 1998. You become more focused on one stimuli that the other objects around it are not perceived even though one was looking at it.

Before inattentional Simons and Levin researched change blindness in 1997. Unlike inattentional blindness the subject is involved in the activity and they are told later on what they might have missed.

Attention and Hearing
Although vision usually dominates our other senes it can not always be trusted. In some cases our mind prefers to top-down processing attention. This lets us focus on one sense at a time meaning we are able to ignore other sounds so we can focus on one. Refereed to as auditory selective hearing or the cocktail party effect Unlike vision hearing cannot be tested by movement rather it must be tested by when a sound reaches ones ears. The dichotic listing task can be used to test haring as well. This is when participants are presented different messages in each ear and told to only pay attention to one. At the end of the study they are unable repeat the message in the unattended ear.In a bottom-up processing there is a noise that causes one to find where it came from and pay attention to that instead. With auditory processing someone can become distracted. For example if you are having a conversation and you hear the sound of dog barking, you start to process the sound and involuntarily that is where your attention is now shifted.

As we age our hearing starts to decline. With this the speed in processing auditory stimuli also declines. Along with age others with auditory processing disorders have difficulties with the speed in which they process sounds. When one sense is lacking our other cognitive processes try to fill in where one is lacking.