Pool Of Attention

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One of the earliest notions of attention and its importance can be traced back before the scientific study of psychology as a whole. Vives (1538), in his book, De Anima et Vita, found that people retain stimuli more accurately if a person mentally attends to and concentrates on the stimuli at hand and thus, strengthens the memory system all together. These findings may seem obvious today; however, Vives’ (1538) work was centuries ahead of his time. Since Vives’ (1538) early work, attention itself has been sorted into various categories such as selective attention, sustained attention, and divided attention (Perry and Hodges, 1999). Furthermore, Vives would help set the stage for others including James (1890), Norman and Bobrow (1975), Shiffrin …show more content…
They postulated that attention, including selective attention, might not be a spotlight-like contraption, but a pool of resources that can be allocated as the mind sees fit. Different tasks compete for and demand different amounts attention from this resource pool, subsequently dividing the resources between one or more tasks (Lesgold, 1989). With this division, come limits. For one, the pool of attention is resource limited, meaning that there is an inability to fully concentrate and accurately perform more than one task at the same time. For example, if a person is texting while driving, the resource pool of attention is split between driving and typing coherent words and sentences. Neither of the tasks are performed particularly well as the bulk of the attentional resources tend to shift between the two exercises, ultimately neglecting the other task (Norman & Bobrow, 1975). Furthermore, the resource pool is also data-limited, or a limitation in which insufficient sensory input is available to perform a task, or the skills needed to carry out a particular task are …show more content…
They argued that when a person first learns a task, a great deal of attentional resources and controlled processing go into doing so. Though after much practice and repetition, a skill is developed and less attention is needed, making the process automatic. This is commonly seen in reading. For novice children, reading is difficult. They must learn the names of the letters, what sounds that they make, and the grammatical rules for their particular language. This results in dedicating a large portion of the attention resource pool to reading, making it hard for them to concentrate on anything else during the task. After repetition and practice over months and sometimes years, however, reading becomes a fluid skill to the point when a person is presented with a word, it is almost impossible not to read it (Schwanenflugel, Meisinger, Wisenbaker, Kuhn, Strauss, & Morris, 2006).
Such automaticity has been used to explain various psychological tasks such as the Stroop effect (Stroop, 1935). The Stroop effect, rightfully named after J.R. Stroop, is a demonstration in which the psychological interference of reading specific words hampers the naming of the color of the words. For example, if the word is “blue” printed in red, when asked to name the color of the print, the reader will take longer to say “red” as compared to naming
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