Attention

4.4 Summary of Section 4

We have seen that attentive processes will ‘work hard’ to unite information into a coherent whole.

  • Even spatially separate visual and auditory stimuli can be joined if they appear to be synchronous (the ventriloquism effect).

  • When stimuli are not synchronous the system attempts to order the segments of the stimuli independently, resulting in distraction and lost information.

  • It is a ‘bottleneck’ in the ordering process that results in one stream of information interfering with the processing of another.