Early selection model

From MerrimackWiki

Definition

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The early selection model was propsed by Broadbent. He depicted the process of selective attention in a flow chart, occuring in stages. Information passes through sensory memory and is there for only a short period of time before it passes through a filter. This filter discards all other information except for the attended message. This filtered information is the passed on to a detector, where only the attended message and its meaning is processed. The message is then passed into and stored in Short Term Memory. The Early Selection Model presents the idea that selective attention occurs before pattern recognition, meaning that the individual will choose what stimulus to focus his attention on before recognizing various features and patterns.

Significance

. Broadbent's model was the first to describe information prcessing in a sequence of stages. He therefore stimulated alot of research and experiments and his model was revised. The Early Selection Model explains why a person can study while listening to music. Broadbent notes that we perform something called attention switching which allows us to switch back and forth between various types of information and filter out what is not important.