Having answered the Philosophy assignment question What is courage? I have moved on to cognitive psychology. The background to one of its founders is interesting. Daniel Broadbent joined the RAF aged 17 and noticed how the placing of levers under the pilot’s seat could cause accidents. One lever raised the flaps and the other raised the undercarriage. With a all the instruments in the cockpit it is important for the pilot to be able to focus on what’s important.
So began his interest in attention. In the 1950s computing was taking off and he developed a theory of human information processing based on IT processes. His flow diagram shows information arriving in parallel to our senses, held in short term storage or memory and then filtered via a limited capacity channel for further processing.
I may well have lost your attention by this point, but suffice it to say that I enjoy this kind of stuff. Colin Cherry’s refinement of Broadbent’s research used dichotic listening experiments to tax a participant’s information processing so that filtering becomes necessary and unavoidable. In those experiments messages were delivered to the participants’ left and right ears either simultaneously or delayed for one ear and the results evaluated. The results have implications for people working with a great deal of information simultaneously, such as air traffic controllers and fighter pilots.
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