... concludes that although in some situations selective attention is applied, in most situations what people attend to is determined by automatic attention, conditioned attention, instinctive attention and attentional biases. Selective attention is controlled in a top-down way by the individual's goal (Eysenck, p. 119). An experiment by Yarbus (1967), for example, showed that if a picture is presented it will be scanned very differently according to what information the viewer wants to retrieve from it (Gleitman, p. 244). He selectively chooses what aspects of the picture to attend to. The cocktail party phenomenon is a typical example of selective attention. When presented with several conversations or auditory messages at the same time, subjects can attend to the chosen one and "ignore" the others. When they are asked to report about the contents of the unattended conversations or messages, none or very little information is available. Why do they remember ...

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