selective attention
What is it?
The visual surroundings that surround us all the time for example billboards can be very distracting and can inhibit us from reaching our current goals. The process that allows us to filter out all of that irrelevant information is selective attention. (van Moorselaar & Slagter, 2020)
Selective attention is the process of focusing on relevant stimuli to allow people adaptive behaviour despite large quantities of irrelevant information (Antonov et al., 2020)
perceptual consciousness
What is it?
Perceptual consciousness is the term made by Price which refers to being in a state of perceiving. One thing to note is just because someone is perceptually conscious of a bus or the rattling of a gate does not mean that these things are actually occurring in reality. that is to say, you can be perpetually conscious of hallucinations
Relation between perception and attention
They are related because they are both subject to the fact that the individual must experience a stimulus before they can assign their attention to the object that he/she identifies
How they are different
when it comes to the interpretation of sensory information perception entails higher-order cognition. It contains smell, sound, visual, depth, and taste. (Robinson-Riegler, c2008).
For example, let us take visual perception. it is divided into three stages the first being selection this is when we convert environmental stimuli into meaningful experience. However as stated above we cannot take in all of the stimuli at once hence we only take in relevant information through a selective process.
The second stage is an organization after taking in the relevant information from the outside world we need to organize it by finding meaningful patterns. This is achieved by putting things or people into separate categories.
The third stage is interpretation, which is the process of attaching meaning to selected stimuli. We first create structured and stable patterns and then assign the meanings to them all of this is done to make the most sense of the stimuli that have bombarded your sensory organs in this case the eyes.
Now if we take selective attention
explain it
While perceptual consciousness is the ability to make sense of the environment by analyzing things and assigning meanings to them. Then there is selective attention which is the ability to focus on certain stimuli that are most relevant to the individual. Even though both of these are cognitive processes they both have very different roles to play.
(Krauzlis et al., 2018) says that selective attention is the capability to remove certain valid stimuli from consideration.
So conscious perception lets us understand the world around us so what does selective attention do for us? People are bombarded with an enormous amount of stimuli each minute so in order to focus on what is important selective attention comes into play and will filter out all of the unnecessary information for us but how is that helpful?
a study done by (Tams et al., 2015) was exploring the relationship between workplace stress and selective attention. In this study, Tams et al. discovered that when employees are working selective attention helps them filter out all of the necessary things. However, when they cannot ignore something their mind shifts from the task at hand to something else reducing the mental resources available to complete the task and in turn making higher levels of mental workloads that result in stress.