The British psychologist Donald Broadbent, like his contemporary George Miller, adopted a model of the mind as an information processor in the 1950s. He, too, recognized that there is much more information entering the brain than the brain can consciously process, just as STM (short-term memory) has a limited capacity. Instead of memory, Broadbent approached the problem from the perspective of attention – how we allot our limited resources for processing information.
He compared the mind to a radio receiver tuned into many stations at once. To deal with this, it had to choose the most important signal and focus on that, switching off the others. Recently, the selective nature of human perception has been dramatically demonstrated by the invisible Gorilla experiment. Participants were told to watch a video clip of a basketball game and count how often the ball was passed between players. However, they didn’t see anyone passing by in a gorilla suit and waving at the camera.
