All 4 Terms & Definitions
- Selective attention
- The capacity to focus cognitive resources on one source of information while ignoring competing distractors. The cocktail party effect — being able to follow one conversation in a noisy room — demonstrates selective attention to speech. Cherry's (1953) dichotic listening experiments first systematically studied it, showing that unattended messages are processed for physical features (voice, pitch) but rarely for meaning.
- Inattentional blindness
- Failure to notice an unexpected, fully visible stimulus when attention is engaged elsewhere. Simons and Chabris (1999) famously showed that ~50% of participants counting basketball passes failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the game. Demonstrates that perception is not automatic — awareness of visible objects depends on attentional resources being available.
- Top-down vs bottom-up attention
- Top-down attention is voluntarily directed by goals, expectations, and task demands — what you are looking for. Bottom-up attention is involuntarily captured by salient, unexpected, or biologically significant stimuli — a sudden loud noise or a flash of light. The two systems interact: top-down attention can suppress bottom-up capture, and bottom-up capture can disrupt ongoing top-down focus.
- Attentional blink
- A ~500 ms window following the successful detection of one target in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream, during which a second target is frequently missed. The deficit reflects competition for limited attentional consolidation resources rather than a sensory processing failure. First reported by Raymond, Shapiro, and Arnell (1992).