selective attention

British  

noun

1. psychol the process by which a person can selectively pick out one message from a mixture of messages occurring simultaneously

---

Example Sentences

Previous research had shown pigeons learned how to solve complex categorization tasks that human ways of thinking -- like selective attention and explicit rule use -- would not be useful in solving.

From Science Daily • Oct. 25, 2023

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons famously showed the effects of selective attention in a video that went viral in 2010.

From The Guardian • Mar. 6, 2018

Reading reality TV requires selective attention — or inattention, more to the point.

From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 15, 2017

A series of experiments at Stanford showed that people who regularly multitask are a lot worse at basic tests of spatial perception, memory, and selective attention than people who don’t.

From Slate • Jun. 15, 2016

The generic image has been constructed under the influence of a selective attention, bent upon aesthetic worth.

From The Sense of Beauty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory by Santayana, George