Attention psychological models

Kelly, J.R., and Loving, T.J. 2004. Time pressure and group performance exploring underlying processes in the Attentional Focus Model. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 40, 185-98. 

As we noted earlier, caffeine affects not only arousal, but also other behavioral influences such as attentional focus. However, it now appears that these other effects may be secondary to the impact of the drug on arousal and that a multi-factorial model incorporating the inverted-U function may best describe that relationship. Most results in the literature to date are supportive of the biobehavioral model proposed here. However, research on the psychological effects of acute and habitual caffeine... 

Earlier theories of attention such as that proposed by Broadbent (1958) suggested that some physical property of sensory stimuli dictates whether or not they are available to further processing (Fig. 1). Crucially Broadbent considered attention to be a real physical property of the nervous system, not a convenient psychological construct or metaphor. In this formulation early selection of stimuli is performed by a limited capacity filter and only selected stimuli are encoded. While this and similar models paved the way for experimental re-... 

Helping clients get a good grasp of the CBT model of social phobia and how it applies to them provides a rationale for all of the interventions that follow. While this can be done verbally, it is usually more powerful if there is an experiential element to it as well (Bennett-Levy et al. 2004), which often comes from behavioural experiments. In Theresa s case, it was important to illustrate the effects of focusing her attention internally, and the role of safety behaviours on her self-consciousness and on how she performed socially. The overall aim of socialising her to the model was to help her to understand the psychological processes that maintained her social phobia. 

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