Treisman's Attenuation Model of Attention
Treisman (1964) aggress with Boradbent’s theory of an early bottleneck filter. However, the
difference is that Treisman's filter attenuates rather than eliminates the unattended material.
Attenuation is like turning down the volume so that if you have 4 sources of sound in one room
(TV, radio, people talking, baby crying) you can turn down or attenuate 3 in order to attend to the
fourth.
This means that people can still process the meaning of attended message(s).
In her experiments, Treisman demonstrated that participants were still able to identify the
contents of an unattended message, indicating that they were able to process the meaning of both
the attended and unattended messages.
Treisman carried out dichotic listening tasks using the speech shadowing method. Typically, in
this method participants are asked to simultaneously repeat aloud speech played into one ear
(called the attended ear) whilst another message is spoken to the other ear.
For example participants asked to shadow "I saw the girl furniture over" and ignore "me that bird
green jumping fee", reported hearing "I saw the girl jumping over"
Clearly, then, the unattended message was being processed for meaning and Broadbent's Filter
Model, where the filter extracted on the basis of physical characteristics only, could not explain
these findings. The evidence suggests that Broadbent's Filter Model is not adequate, it does not
allow for meaning being taken into account.
Evaluation of Treisman's Model
1. Treisman's Model overcomes some of the problems associated with Broadbent's Filter Model,
e.g. the Attenuation Model can account for the 'Cocktail Party Syndrome'.
2. Treisman's model does not explain how exactly semantic analysis works.
3. The nature of the attenuation process has never been precisely specified.
4. A problem with all dichotic listening experiments is that you can never be sure that the
participants have not actually switched attention to the so called unattended channel.
