Attention (psychology)
Also known as: attentional processing
Attention is the cognitive process of concentrating limited mental resources on some information while filtering out the rest. Because processing capacity is finite, attention determines which stimuli reach conscious awareness and get encoded into memory.
Psychologists treat attention as a limited resource that must be allocated. The environment supplies far more sensory input than the brain can process, so attention acts as a gate: selected information receives deep processing and can be encoded into memory, while unattended information fades. This is why attention is a prerequisite for learning — material you never attended to was never available to remember.
Selective attention is the ability to focus on one stream of input while ignoring others. Broadbent's early filter model proposed that unattended channels are blocked at an early, sensory stage. Treisman's attenuation model refined this: unattended input is turned down rather than shut off, which explains the cocktail party effect — you can follow one conversation in a noisy room yet still notice your own name spoken across it. Failures of selection produce inattentional blindness, in which an unexpected but plainly visible object goes unnoticed because attention was engaged elsewhere.
Divided attention describes attempts to process multiple inputs at once. Performance depends on how automatic the tasks are. Controlled processing is effortful, serial, and capacity-limited — the state of a new driver — while automatic processing is fast, parallel, and demands little capacity, as driving becomes with practice. Kahneman's resource model frames this as a general pool of attentional capacity distributed across tasks, with arousal and task difficulty determining how much is available. The Stroop effect demonstrates the cost when automatic processing conflicts with a controlled goal: naming the ink color of a mismatched color word is measurably slower.
The MCAT tests attention in the psychological, social, and biological foundations of behavior section, under making sense of the environment. Expect passage-based questions that name a specific model — Broadbent's filter, Treisman's attenuation, or Kahneman's resource theory — or ask you to identify a phenomenon such as the cocktail party effect, inattentional blindness, or the shift from controlled to automatic processing from a described experiment.
Key takeaways
- Attention allocates limited processing capacity, determining what reaches awareness and gets encoded into memory.
- Selective attention focuses on one input stream; Broadbent proposed an early filter and Treisman an attenuated one.
- The cocktail party effect shows unattended channels are still processed enough to detect personally relevant information.
- Divided attention succeeds when tasks are automatic and fails when both require controlled processing.
- Inattentional blindness and the Stroop effect are classic demonstrations of attention's limits.