4 Listen Activity 3
Activity #L3: Select the Difference
Selective attention is all about focusing your mental energy. Remember the spotlight? When your attention is dedicated to one piece of information at a time, you are more likely to notice details you wouldn’t otherwise.
When I think of a time in college when I was asked to remember a detailed image, I think of a neuron (brain cell) and its parts. My professors required me to remember all the parts of the neuron and the process of how neurons communicate – called an action potential. This is not an easy task. My efforts were enhanced by a detailed drawing of a neuron and all of its parts. One way I studied was to draw the cell and include blanks that I could go back and fill in. The point is, I had to be so focused on the details of the neuron in order to learn the fundamentals of how the brain works!
Think of a time when you were given a detailed image to remember if you didn’t take the time or effort to really focus on learning the details of the image, it would be quite hard to detect differences.
Check out these two images. At first glance, they may look the same, but they are not. Count how many differences you can SELECT and answer the question below.
This select the difference activity calls out our ability to really make sure we are focusing on something – in detail. We often mistaken the level of detail to our remembering. For example, memory experts know that people are quite bad at remembering details from the scene of an accident. If you were a witness to a fender bender where the car that caused the accident fled the scene could you remember details like: What color was the car? What was the make and model? What about the license plate? While it isn’t fun to image being witness to an accident, our failure to recall detail demonstrates how we can focus without REALLY remembering. Being able to detect differences is a key feature of selective attention.
