Szostalo, Marius
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Audience: Undergraduate. -- Dissertation: Thesis (B. A.). -- Algoma University, 1998. -- Submitted in partial fulfillment of course requirements for PSYC 4105. -- Contents: Thesis.
At any given moment the number of concurrent events is too great for conscious analysis. However it is possible to attend selectively to any one event, thereby becoming conscious of its meaning. The question being posed is: to what degree, is the not-attended-to-information processed? Early processing theorists (e.g. Treisman 1964) assumed that the processing of an unattended message took place only when a shift in attention occurs, such as when a threshold is lowered for a particular word. The late processing theories (e.g. Deutsch & Deutsch 1963) stated that all information is being taken in, and the limitation occurs later in processing. In this study participants were asked to shadow one message while ignoring the other and to react to changes on computer screen at the same time. Participants' reaction time significantly decreased when events on the screen were cued by a word in the ignored message.
