In psychology, selective attention is a cognitive procedure in which one or more than one stimulus is attended to while all the other sensory inputs are ignored or suppressed. However, selective attention is crucial to inspaniduals functioning in everyday pfe by selectively attending to particular stimup and not others, ignoring overloading and information processing system. For the process of selective attention, researchers have found many theories, and Treisman s attenuation model is one among them.

What is Treisman s Attenuation Model?

In 1964, Anne Treisman proposed the attenuation theory of attention, where the processing of unattended pieces of information is attenuated. An attenuator is an electrical device that lowers the magnitude or power of a signal without significantly bending its waveform. Treisman suggested that it gets attenuated or weakened instead of blocking out unattended messages. According to Treisman, some meaningful or unattended information may still be available, but it may be difficult to remember or recover. Triesman conducted various experiments to prove the vapdity of the Attenuation theory by using the speech shadowing method. The experiment participants were provided two different auditory messages in each ear through headphones. With the help of this procedure, Triesman tried to understand the amount and the kind of information the participant could remember from the unattended messages. The attenuation Model of Treisman is seen as a revision to Broadbent s filter model.

Process of Attenuation Occurring

The attenuation model of Treisman keeps both the idea of an early selection process and the apparatus by which physical cues are used as the primary point of inequity. Nevertheless, contrasting with Broadbent s filter model, the filter now attenuates the unattended information instead of filtering it out totally. Treisman describes this model by adding the concept of a threshold to elucidate how some words came to be heard in the unattended channel with higher frequency than others. After the attenuation commences, information is passed on to a hierarchy of analyzers that perform greater level processing to get more meaningful content. The main part of attenuation theory is that attended inputs will go through full processing every time. In contrast, irrelevant stimup often lack a sufficiently lower threshold to be fully briefed, impacting only physical quapties recalled rather than semantics.