Historical and Contemporary Models of Attention Processes with Implications for Learning

A brief historical review of research into attention and attention processes along with a description of current models explaining the how people visually perceive stimuli. Components of attention are identified along with implications for learning and education. The readiness to perceive environmental stimuli represents an ability to attend, and the process of attending depends upon characteristics of the attending organism as well as features of the environmental stimuli. A universally agreed-upon definition has not yet appeared in the literature; however, "attention refers to several different capacities or processes that are related to aspects of how the organism becomes receptive to stimuli and how it may begin processing incoming or attended-to excitation" (Lezak, 1995, p. 39). Attention processing involves the brain's ability to regulate stimuli, which requires both the initiation and inhibition of behavior and activity in an ongoing basis. Attention processing occurs within each sensory modality, although most studies on attention have focused upon auditory and visual processing. Disorders of attention have been conceptualized as a disturbance of attention span, self-regulation, activity level, and impulse control (Teeter & Semrud-Clikeman, 1997). This paper focuses exclusively on a review of research literature relevant to the visual attention process, with models of attention processing presented that have relevance for attention disorders and for strategies of learning. Historical Perspective The study of attention has long been a part of the psychology literature. As such, attention has been conceptualized according to a number of psychological perspectives. Early in the nineteenth century (Norman, 1977), a Functionalist perspective looked upon attention as an active function of the organism that is based upon motivational state; while a structuralist perspective looked studied attention as a state of consciousness consisting of increased concentration that results in sensory clearness. During the twentieth century, empirical psychologists studied which stimuli served as determiners of attention and the attention value of those stimuli, i.e., the intensity of duration of stimuli. In the 1950s, Broadbent (1958, 1961) summarized the existing literature by characterizing attention as a single-channel filtering mechanism that selects certain stimuli from a background of other stimuli competing for that organism's attention. The selection of stimuli, according to Broadbent (1958), depends upon the physical characteristics of those stimuli and some essential characteristics of the filtering mechanism. Broadbent (1958) described the filtering mechanism as having limited capacity and, therefore, selects only certain stimuli in serial order when processing information. In the 1960s, Treisman (1960) posited a two-channel model of selective attention; whereby one primary channel is attended to, while a second nonattended channel processes semantic information from other sources in an attenuated fashion. This two-channel attending process allows the living organism to successfully engage two tasks if they're easy, but that performance is more likely to break down as those tasks become increasingly difficult. Thus, when the resource demand exceeds the resource supply, the attention capacity becomes overwhelmed and the organism looses ability to attend to extraneous stimuli. Currently, psychological literature focuses upon such constructs as mental resources, automaticity, and stimulus selection; and the study of attention is beginning to generate important experimental research (DeAngelis, 1994). To this extent, the literature continues to look at the attention demands made by numerous competing stimuli upon an organism having limited capacity to process those stimuli, and that these extereoceptive stimuli can be processed either with awareness (i.e., effortful processing) or automatically (i. …