Selective Perception: An Introduction

You're a twelve-year-old boy and a Britney Spears' Pepsi commercial has just come on the television. Your mother is in the middle of asking you whether or not you've fed the dogs and clarifying that Charger, the fat dog, needs less food than George, the other dog. You were listening to her just fine a moment ago. But, suddenly, something's changed; Britney's arrived on the scene.

Then, as Britney dances into the sunset, a commercial comes on for Hamburger Helper and your mother is mesmerized. "What was that you were saying?" you ask her. After no reply you proceed to feeding the dogs, making sure that you give Charger an extra helping so that he can maintain his impressive bulk.

Donald E. Broadbent, in the late 1950's, created a model of human perception, which holds that, due to limited capacity, we must process information selectively (1958). That is to say, there are restrictions on our individual perceptual systems which make it so that, when presented with information from two different channels, i.e. methods of delivery such as visual and auditory, our perceptual system processes only that which it believes to be most relevant. Furthermore, Broadbent, puts forth that we are able to switch unnoticed between channels when one channel is deemed just as necessary to our well-being as another (1971).

The comical, but familiar to many, episode described above gives us a peek at how a twelve-year-old boy has selected what information he is going to process. This example allows us to witness the four phases in the human information receiving process. As we receive, and then disseminate, information received from the world around us through our senses, we progress through four stages: stimulation, registration, organization and, finally, interpretation (Arul, 2000). Perception occurs during the first and last phases of the process. The first phase, stimulation, can occur only when something is noticed and to be noticed it must first be perceived. As we progress through these four phases, the role of true facts gathered from the stimulation diminishes, while the role of garnering meaning from the stimulation increases.

This last phase, interpretation, gives meaning to the stimulation based on both external factors (such as the actual stimulus) and internal factors (such as how the stimulus is perceived to fit the receiver's needs). These internal factors live below our level of conscious cognition and are recognizing and compartmentalizing the meaning of the stimulus without knowing effort on our part. These same internal factors, as determinants of how we interpret our world, tend to "select" that which fits most congruously with how they currently exist. Eventually, we become habitualized into certain ways of perceiving the facts via this process during which we are exposed to information, attend to that information and comprehend the information (Minor & Mowen, 1998).

How does this tie in with the Britney Spears' Pepsi commercial and a twelve-year-old boy? Visual and audio stimulation (Britney) grab the boy's attention. He then registers that it is, indeed, Britney and that she's dancing and singing. His mind begins to organize what stimulation and registration have brought him and it searches for the meaning of Britney dancing and singing. Finally, ah ha!, interpretation! Britney = "sexy," or even "speaks for my generation" (plus a likely host of perceptions that cannot even be verbalized).

Meanwhile, in order for this process to occur, this very process has had to shut down in other areas. That's why he doesn't hear his mother talking to him. And she is going through this process as well except it's the reason she's not seeing Britney; her internal factors don't interpret the stimulation the same way her son does.

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