Selective attention
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Selective attention is a state of consciousness which involves focusing on a specific aspect of a scene while ignoring other aspects. Selective attention can be conscious (as when one chooses to attend to an interesting object, such as a television, instead of a less interesting one, such as a coffee table) or unconscious (as in a scene of a green field with a single red tulip - the tulip will receive attention initially). Often, people believe they have taken in an entire scene when, in reality, they had only processed the area they were attending to and only had a general gist of the rest of the scene.
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| The States of Consciousness Continuum |
|---|
| Part of the Psychology series |
| TOTAL AWARENESS |
| Focused, selective attention |
| Divided attention |
| Daydreaming |
| Meditative state |
| Hypnotised state |
| Asleep |
| Anaethetised |
| Coma |
| Complete lack of awareness |
Examples:
- Focusing on one voice during a party in which many people are speaking
Some effects of selective attention are:
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[edit] Mechanisms of selection
Various theories have been proposed about how certain aspects of a scene receive attention while others do not. Anne Treisman's Feature integration theory is widely accepted. Kyle Cave's FeatureGate model builds on Treisman's ideas, and proposes two mechanisms of visual selection, bottom-up and top-down, which roughly correlate with unconscious and conscious attentional selection, respectively.
Is selective attention the basis for meditaion?
[edit] Photographic techniques
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Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. This article has been tagged since January 2007. |
There is a wide range of photographic techniques that can be used by artists to trigger selective attention. They work by drawing the viewer's eye toward a particular aspect of a photograph.
Photographic techniques include:
- The Rule of Thirds,
- Leading Lines,
- Contrast,
- Colour,
- Patterns,
- Selective focus, and
- Depth of field.
[edit] See also
- Attention versus memory in prefrontal cortex
- Cognitive control
- Dot-probe paradigm
- Inattentional blindness
[edit] References
- Psychology VCE Units 3 & 4, third edition, John Grivas, Ross Down, Linda Carter, ISBN 0-7329-8933-7; published 2004 by Macmillan Education Australia Pty Ltd.
