SELECTIVE ATTENTION: ITS RELATIONSHIP TO PERCEPTUAL
PROCESSING OF INFORMATION IN PRESPEECH MEMORY BUFFER
Does Selective Attention (mechanism that further processes information in a prespeech memory buffer) inhibit the processing of unattended information or is there a cognitive mechanism that automatically processes input even if humans are not attending to it? The research attempts to answer this question through an exploration of the effects of auditory color-word interference on a visual Stroop interference task with a spoken response.
The context within which the conducted research can best be understood begins with some early work in the field conducted by Broadbent (1958). In this early work where subjects monitored (selectively attended to) input, Broadbent found that (1) Semantic/conceptual features of stimuli were harder to attend to than were the physical features of the stimuli, and (2) only the physical features could be recalled for unattended stimuli. As a result it was postulated that Selective Attention operates to filter out or inhibit the processing of semantic information when this information is coming through a channel that is not being monitored. This finding l@d to the notion that unattended input does not receive perceptual analysis; the notion was based on a model which stated that the prespeech buffer was limited to one item at a time. Therefore, if an item arrived when the buffer was occupied, the item would be lost. It is important here to realize that with such a model, interference would be said to occur only when an irrelevant item arrived at the buffer before the relevant item.
other researchers and theorists have argued against the foregoing model (e.g. Treisman, 1960; Norman, 1968) stating that perceptual analysis is automatic and doesn't depend on selective attention. These statements are based on models in which prespeech buffers are said to hold multiple items. For example, o...