before her/him. While participating in a race in your school, you might have seen the participants on the starting line in an alert state waiting for the whistle to blow in order to run. Concentration refers to focusing of awareness on certain specific objects while excluding others for the moment. For example, in the classroom, a student concentrates on the teacher’s lecture and ignores all sorts of noises coming from different corners of the school.
In search an observer looks for some specified subset of objects among a set of objects. For example, when you go to fetch your younger sister and brother from the school, you just look for them among innumerable boys and girls. All these activities require some kind of effort on the part of people. Attention in this sense refers to “effort allocation”.
Attention has a focus as well as a fringe. When the field of awareness is centered on a particular object or event, it is called focus or the focal point of attention. On the contrary, when the objects or events are away from the center of awareness and one is only vaguely aware of them, they are said to be at the fringe of attention. Attention has been classified in a number of ways.
A process-oriented view divides it into two types, namely selective and sustained . We will briefly discuss the main features of these types of attention. Sometimes we can also attend to two different things at the same time. When this happens, it is called divided attention .
Box . describes when and how the division of attention is possible. Selective Attention Selective attention is concerned mainly with the selection of a limited number of stimuli or objects from a large number of stimuli. We have already indicated that our perceptual system has a limited capacity to receive and process information.
This means that it can deal only with a few stimuli at a given moment of time. The question is, which of those stimuli will get selected and processed? Psychologists have identified a number of factors that determine