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UNIT 3: SENSORY REGISTER (ATTENTION)
The first store of memory we have. It is distributed in several parts, primary areas.
IN FO RMA TIO N PRO CE SS SY S TE M
1. CH ARA CT ERI ST ICS O F T HE SE NS ORY R EGI ST ER
• Capacity → It is unlimited, briefly stored.
• Forms of storage → Same form as sensed; the information is not interpreted yet (there is not a specific location of the sensory
register but many areas in which is held, related to those primary auditory areas already commented)
• Duration → According to G. Sperling (1960) it is less than a second.
o He made an experiment in which there were three rows shown in vertical way with letters and each display was
presented in a fraction of a second and individuals were asked to remember a particular symbol or any symbol.
o When they were exposed to this they tried to remember everything except the information in the sensory register,
if it does not pass to the memory, we cannot retain it.
• Auditory information → Human speech needs ‘secuencial’ contextual information, we need to retain the sound in order to
decode the information.
o 2 to 4 seconds.
o Human speech understood only within its sequential context.
2. AT TE NTI ON
The focused cognitive processing of particular aspects of the environment.
• Capacity → It is unlimited, people are incapable of attending to everything at once.
• The Nature of Attention → Attention is selective, and it has the ability to focus the attention of at least one other sense
without turning physically. This ability is known as the Cocktail party phenomenon.
THE COCKTAIL PARTY PHENOMENON
o The ability to attend to one spoken message while ignoring others; even in two sources, we may attend two sources
of information if they are from different senses. That selective attention gives us the ability to select one of the points
among the rest.
AUDITORY ATTENTION FILTER
o Used to select physical characteristics to select one message and screen out others. However, according to more recent
research, information is not totally filtered out from a supposedly unattended message, but words from unattended
messages fit meaningfully into the attended message.
Gestalt psychologists proposed that humans can only pay attention to one thing at a time. While other scholars suggested that
humans can pay attention to one complex source of information at a time. Thus, when more than one stimulus is presented,
attention switches quickly back and forth.
• Attention limited processing capacity → The stimuli being attended to depends on cognitive processing load.
• Selective attention → It involves two types of processing:
1. Bottom-up
o It goes from the detail to the whole.
o This approach involves processing information starting from the sensory receptors and moving up to the
brain for interpretation.
o Bottom-up processing is often referred to as a data-driven process which relies on the actual sensory input to
form perceptions.
Example: When you look at a picture, bottom-up processing involves analyzing the individual elements of
the image (colors, shapes, lines) and combining them to form an overall perception of what the picture
represents.
