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

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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

But in each of these cases the action of selective attention is comparatively involuntary, passive, and even unconscious, not having anything of the character of a conscious striving to compass some end.

From Illusions A Psychological Study by Sully, James