User:Samanthaliggan/my sandbox

Attenuation Theory
Attenuation Theory is part of attention and is Anne Treisman's modified version of the Filter Theory proposed by Broadbent in 1958. Broadbent's Filter Theory proposed that unattended messages are completely blocked before they are processed for meaning. Anne Treisman believed that some meaningful information in unattended messages might still be available, but may be hard to recover. She compared this theory to volume control in saying that our "volume" can be turned "down." The attenuation model therefore proposes that there is a decrease in the perceived loudness of an unattended message.

Treisman suggested messages are processed in a systematic way, beginning with analysis of physical characteristics, syllabic pattern, and individual words. After that, grammatical structure and meaning are processed.

Additional info
Meaningful units, such as words or phrases, are processed quite easily.

Words that have subjective importance (like one's name) or that signal danger (someone shouting the words fire or watch out) have lowered thresholds, which means they are easily recognizable at lower volumes.


 * Example- You hear people behind you whispering and you're not positive of what was said but you know  you heard your name in the midst of their conversation. The reason your name is so easily heard is because it requires little mental effort.

Treisman's Experiments
Treisman carried out experiments to prove the Attenuation Theory valid using the speech shadowing method. The speech shadowing method is when participants are asked to simultaneously repeat aloud speech played into one ear (called the attended ear) while another message is spoken into the other ear.

In one of her experiments, identical messages were played into both ears but with a slight delay between them. If the delay was too long, the participants were unable to realize that the same material was played into both ears. When the unattended message was ahead of the shadowed message by up to 2 seconds, participants noticed the similarity.

In an experiment with bilingual participants, Treisman presented the attended message in English and the unattended message in a French translation. When the French translation lagged only slightly behind the English translation, participants could report that both messages had the same meaning. Clearly, then, the unattended message was being processed for meaning and Broadbent's Filter Model, where the filter extracted on the basis of physical characteristics only, could not explain these findings. The evidence suggests that Broadbent's Filter Model is not adequate, it does not allow for meaning being taken into account.

Threshold
To be analysed, items have to reach a certain threshold of intensity. All of the attended/selected material will reach this threshold but only some of the attenuated items. As mentioned above, some items will retain a permanently reduced threshold, for example your own name or words/phrases like 'help' and 'fire'. Other items will have a reduced threshold at a particular moment if they have some relevance to the main attended message.