How Attention Affects Perception

In this video, we discuss the role that attention plays in determining our ability to attend to things and in what we pay attend to in the first place. We discuss a major theory of how attention works as well as several limitations to our attentional abilities through demonstrations.
Selective Attention: The ability to select one sensory input and ignore or minimize others; adaptive in that it prevents sensory overload, such that we do not have to attend to every stimulus in our environment.
Broadbent’s Filter Theory of Attention: Theory which states that attention is a bottleneck through which information passes, allowing us to take some and ignore the rest.
Cocktail Party Effect: A limitation of Broadbent’s Filter Theory of Attention which shows that attention cannot always be controlled; phenomenon in which you might instinctively hear and subsequently attend to your name spoken in a conversation that didn’t involve you.
Inattentional Blindness: A failure to notice something that is completely visible because of a lack of attention.
Change Blindness: A failure to notice a change in one’s environment because of a lack of attention.