Psychology And Types Of Attention

601 Words3 Pages
Types of Attention Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. There are many factors that affect Attention; these are internal factors and external. Internal factors are the ones that belong to the individual, such as interests and expectations. External factors are those that come from the stimulus, the characteristics that belong to the stimuli that draw our attention. Examples might be color, shape, size or intensity. There are five types of attention; these are focused, sustained, selective, alternating and divided. Focused attention required the ability to answer individually to visual, auditory or tactile stimuli. Sustained Attention refers to the ability to maintain a consistent response during a continuous or repetitive activity, an example of this can be while watching a movie a person would most likely maintain a constant attention for the 2 hour movie. Selective Attention is the capacity to maintain a behavioral or cognitive set in the face of distracting or competing stimuli. Meaning that you block a distracting friend that speaks to you during class, because you are supposed to pay attention to the teacher. There are two types of selective attention, visual selective attention; an example of this is John Stroop, who proposed the Stroop effect in 1935, the experiment tried to analyze the reaction time of a task if interference was present. First he gave a patient a card with the words mentioning colors, and the color painted were those mentioned, people would do this fairly fast and take about 9 to 15 seconds. In the second cards he showed the patients words mentioning colors, but written in a different color, here they had to mention the color in which the word is written, this card was were the interference was present and since reading is an automatic process, people
Open Document