Question -
Answer -
The process through which certain stimuli are selected from a group of others is generally referred to as attention.
The properties of attention are selection, alertness, concentration and search.
- Selection— A large number of stimuli impinge upon our sense organs simultaneously, but we do not notice all of them at the same time. Only a selected few of them are noticed, e.g. when you enter your classroom you encounter several things like doors, walls, windows etc but you selectively focus only on one or two of them at one time.
- Alertness— Alertness refers to an individual’s readiness to deal with stimuli that appear before him/her. e.g. while participating in a race in your school you must have seen the participants on the starting line in an alert state waiting for the whistle to blow in order to run.
- Concentration— Concentration refers to focusing of awareness on certain specific objects while excluding others for the moment, e.g. in the classroom a student concentrates on the teacher’s lecture and ignores all sorts of noises coming from different comers of the school.
- Search— In search an observer looks for some specified subset of objects among a set of objects, e.g. when we go to school to fetch our younger sister and brother from the school we just look for them among innumerable boys and girls.