Why You Didn't Hear the noise: The Psychology of Selective Attention

Image Credit: The Sceptical Teacher

By Ojo Deborah 

Have you ever been in a conversation with a friend at a party and only noticed how loud the party was when a pause in the discussion occurred? John was at a dinner party with his group of friends and had just gone to connect with his favourite influencer. He was so engrossed in the conversation that he didn't notice how loud the party was and the activities going on until the conversation ended.

This is Selective Attention in action: the act of focusing on a stimulus while ignoring distractions and irrelevant stimuli. As humans, we cannot process all the information we get at a time, and selective attention helps us to focus on things that actually matter.

As psychology majors, there is a tendency to be interested in every information and be fixated on analysing all information that comes to us. Selective Attention helps us tame this second nature. 

The famous Invisible Gorilla test further buttresses this phenomenon.  In the experiment performed by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, they found that half of the people who counted the passes in a basketball game missed the gorilla because they were focused on the passes and not the gorilla.

Beyond our studentship, selective attention is essential in our everyday lives.

We can use this to our advantage by focusing on just one thing instead of trying to grasp the concept behind everything.  However, this phenomenon has been used by many to commit crimes where the attention of a victim is diverted by a distraction. 

So, if you notice that you missed something that has always been there or notice something everyone else overlooked, that is just Selective attention playing out. Understanding this concept doesn't just make us better students; it makes us more observant and ultimately smarter humans.