“selective attention: Picking out the most relevant cue among stimuli in the environment, and excluding the rest. It is well established that people do not pay attention to everything; for example, at a party an individual can focus on the voice of one person with whom he or she is conversing.
Yet while it is clear that people do filter out a great number of stimuli, it is not at all clear how this is done, nor what information is noted unconsciously. In an attempt to find out, psychologist have often used dichotic listening experiments (that is, two different messages are presented separately to each ear), roughly along the lines of the situation at a party.
If a child’s ‘attention’ problems are selective—that is, appearing only in certain subjects—it suggests that he or she is capable of paying attention when the subjects are comprehensible and meaningful.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
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