#5 Span of Attention Experiment - IGNOU MA Psychology I Year Practical File

Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. Attention has also been referred to as the allocation of processing resources.

When the nature of various stimulus items presented randomly is the same, the maximum number of items or objects grasped by a person is called his span of attention.

As gestalt psychologist has shown human minds tends to take things as a whole. Where it fails to apprehend the whole, it goes to parts rather smaller wholes. When we come across a word PSYCHOLOGY we usually have a glance at this letter grouping plus few initial letters and read the word. It is interesting to note that if any letter in the middle, say “o” is missing, still, the word is correctly perceived. This overlooking of typographical errors is called proof reader’s illusion. Attention plays an important role in perception, cognition, and action, influencing the choices an
individual make. The study of attention has been of interest to the field of psychology since its earliest days. 21 Wilhelm Wundt was one of the main persons to contribute to the study of attention. The relationship between attention and perception is one of the first topics to be studied in experimental psychology.

Wundt held that attention was an inner activity that caused ideas to be present to differing degrees of consciousness. Wundt suggested that the focus of attention could narrow or widen. During the late 19th century, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) argued that attention is necessary for visual perception. Using himself as a subject and pages of briefly visible printed letters as stimuli, he found that attention could be directed in advance of the stimulus presentation to a particular region of the page, even though the eyes were kept fixed at a central point. He also found that attention was limited. William James’s in his book on Principles of Psychology (1980) described as taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.

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