- Define sensation
- Define perception
Psychologist Donald Broadbent (1958) proposed a selective filter theory to help explain why we attend to some information and filter out other information. According to this selective filter theory, our ability to perceive information operates like a bottleneck.
Numerous sensory inputs enter the broadest part of the “bottle”, representing everything our body can sense at a given time. However, our perceptual store is limited, and cannot process all of that information, so sensory information must be filtered through the much more narrow “neck” of the bottle. Thus, few sensory inputs actually make it through.[1]
Related to this theory, Broadbent (1958) developed the dichotic listening task, in which people must attend and respond to stimuli broadcasted in one ear while ignoring the information broadcasted in the other.
Just for fun, you can experience what it’s like to participate in a dichotic listening task for yourself.
For this exercise, you will need a pair of headphones. Watch the following video and try your hardest to repeat the second sentence you hear aloud.
You can view the transcript for “Dichotic Listening- Task 1–Wear Headphones” here (opens in new window).
Testing Broadbent’s original findings that information attended to is better recalled than the information that is ignored, recent research (e.g., Tanaka, 2021) has found that many participants have an ear advantage (i.e., one ear is better equipped to pick up signals than the other).[2]