In psychology, selective attention is a cognitive procedure in which one or more than one stimulus is attended to while all the other sensory inputs are ignored or suppressed. However, selective attention is crucial to individuals' functioning in everyday life by selectively attending to particular stimuli and not others, ignoring overloading and information processing system. For the process of selective attention, researchers have found many theories, and Treisman's attenuation model is one among them.
In 1964, Anne Treisman proposed the attenuation theory of attention, where the processing of unattended pieces of information is attenuated. An attenuator is an electrical device that lowers the magnitude or power of a signal without significantly bending its waveform. Treisman suggested that it gets attenuated or weakened instead of blocking out unattended messages. According to Treisman, some meaningful or unattended information may still be available, but it may be difficult to remember or recover. Triesman conducted various experiments to prove the validity of the Attenuation theory by using the speech shadowing method. The experiment participants were provided two different auditory messages in each ear through headphones. With the help of this procedure, Triesman tried to understand the amount and the kind of information the participant could remember from the unattended messages. The attenuation Model of Treisman is seen as a revision to Broadbent's filter model.
The attenuation model of Treisman keeps both the idea of an early selection process and the apparatus by which physical cues are used as the primary point of inequity. Nevertheless, contrasting with Broadbent's filter model, the filter now attenuates the unattended information instead of filtering it out totally. Treisman describes this model by adding the concept of a threshold to elucidate how some words came to be heard in the unattended channel with higher frequency than others. After the attenuation commences, information is passed on to a hierarchy of analyzers that perform greater level processing to get more meaningful content. The main part of attenuation theory is that attended inputs will go through full processing every time. In contrast, irrelevant stimuli often lack a sufficiently lower threshold to be fully briefed, impacting only physical qualities recalled rather than semantics.
The functioning of the recognition threshold is straightforward. A person has a definite threshold or amount of activation needed to recognize every feasible input. The lower the threshold level, the more simply and likely an input will be recognized, even after attenuation. There are several effectors of the threshold. Those are −
Context and Priming − Context plays a vital role in lowering the threshold needed to understand stimuli by making an expectancy for connected information. An apparatus of priming perform context. Accordingly, the information related to it becomes more relevant and accessible temporarily- reducing the threshold for understanding the procedure.
Subjective Importance − Words with subjective importance will have a lower degree of a threshold than those that do not have any subjective importance. On the other hand, few words are more changeable in meaning and depend upon their density of use, continuity, and context with the attended message to be recognized.
Degree of Attenuation − The attenuation degree can differ in connection to the content of the fundamental message. With the greater amount of attenuation happening for logical messages that possess little benefit to the individual hearing them. Confused messages get the largest amount of attenuation as any intervention they may show up on the attended message would be more harmful than that of complementary information. The attenuation level has an intense result on whether an input will be recognized and can actively differ based on the attentional demands.
While facilitating the possibility for vital, unexpected, or attended stimuli to be recognized, it ensures that those messages are adequately attenuated and do not get through much more than the prior stages of analysis, stopping an overburden on sensory processing capacity. Full hierarchy processing takes place if the attentional demand is low. If the demands are high, attenuation becomes more aggressive and only allows vital or pertinent information from the unattended message to be processed. The hierarchical analysis procedure features a serial nature, surrendering a distinctive impact for each word analyzed. Attenuated messages pass through all the analyzers only if the threshold has been powered in the favor. The hierarchical process also provides an essential motive if inputs are similar in voice, size, and spatial cues. All these physical features must be similar between messages, and then attenuation cannot effectively happen at an early level based on these things. Rather, attenuation will happen during the recognition of words and meanings, and this is where the magnitude of grasping information can be short.
From the above discussion, it can be concluded that Triesman's Attenuation Model is founded to explain how sometimes unattended stimuli came to be processed more meticulously than Broadbent's Filter model. Treisman's attenuation model is a theory of selective attention. The attenuator analyzes the messages. The attenuation process, recognition threshold and effectors of threshold, and hierarchy of analyzers have been discussed. Treisman attenuation model has advantages; from the experiment, it can be suggested that participants of the experiments were still able to recognize the contents of unattended messages designating that they were able to process the meaning of both the attended and unattended messages. Some of the criticism of the Treisman attenuation model is- that it does not appropriately describe the way semantic analysis work and that the nature of the attenuation procedure has never been accurately specified. A common problem with all dichotic listening tasks is that an individual cannot be sure that the participants have not shifted attention to the so-called unattended channel.
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