Different models of attention have been developed throughout history, with the Broadbent model focusing on a sensory filter that sorts information by relevance, the Treisman model on attenuation and importance, and the Deutsch and Deutsch model on importance assignment mechanisms. These models have helped understand how attention is focused when senses are overloaded with information.
Models of attention have been developed within the human brain throughout history. In the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of research was completed to expand the attention span of the human brain, which is the process of deciding which information is important and which should be ignored or classified as less important. Theories are laid out in each of the different models of attention to explain how the human brain processes information and decides which ones should be processed. The three main models are known as the Broadbent model, the Treisman model, and the Deutsch and Deutsch model.
Donald Broadbent produced an attention model known as the filter model in 1958, but now known as the Broadbent model. Studies were completed by Broadbent on military air traffic controllers receiving and sending large amounts of information simultaneously. Large amounts of information have produced a bottleneck that is selected by the brain in a sensory filter that decides the importance of each piece of information. Information that is not processed, or is classified as unimportant, rapidly decays in the sensory filter. Broadbent’s theory holds that information is sorted in the brain by relevance before being processed in the conscious parts of the brain.
Treisman’s attenuation model was developed in the 1960s as a different model of attention than the Broadbent model, with attenuation referring to the ability of the human brain to lower the strength of information passing to it when it is classified as unimportant or not important than other information. Attention is focused in this model on information deemed important by the individual, while information seen as unimportant is processed less thoroughly by the human brain. During this attenuation model, information is processed for physical characteristics and word recognition through a filter. Each piece of information is passed through a filter, similar to the Broadbent model, to create a bottleneck which must then be filtered for importance. Completion of experiments to support Treisman’s theory included the use of information passed through headphones in large amounts of superimposed information.
A third model of attention is known as the Deutsch and Deutsch model, which is similar to Treisman’s theory of attenuation. Deutsch and Deutsch advance the theory that all information passed to a human being works through the full set of mechanisms of the mind, whether attention is focused on the information or not. Only information that stands out to meet the highest level of importance at that specific moment is brought forward and focused. Treisman’s theory differs from Deutsch and Deutsch because, in Treisman, the selection of important information is done at an early stage of information processing. Deutsch and Deutsch argue that information is ordered by importance at the end of importance assignment mechanisms within the brain.
Bottleneck models of attention have provided the initial research into how attention is focused when a human’s senses are overloaded with information. The problems with bottleneck theories are based on the need to overload information about the person being tested, with test subjects facing only a small number of information choices. Switching attention between information during these bottleneck attention patterns is not allowed.
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