Hughes R W, Jones D M
School of Psychology, Cardiff University, UK.
Noise Health. 2003 Oct-Dec;6(21):63-76.
Critical to survival, and also to the organism's efficient management of the flow of information in the brain, is attentional selectivity; the ability to select one source of information to guide action whilst ignoring others that are irrelevant to the current behavioural goal. But such selectivity is not merely the inclusion of the relevant information and the complete neglect of irrelevant information. We discuss in this paper the way that all sound is processed in an obligatory fashion--whether relevant or irrelevant--and discuss the fate of sound in the case when it is irrelevant to the immediate mental task. Using the so-called irrelevant sound paradigm we show that unattended information is both registered and organised. This obligatory process of organisation compromises the efficiency of particular types of mental activity. We discuss how such interference comes about but the key emphasis is upon the possible beneficial effects of such processing-of-the-irrelevant, in allowing the switching of attention to be more facile and intelligent and in allowing the accumulation of evidence about statistical regularities in the auditory world (such as those helpful to the efficient perception, acquisition and use of language). In sum, we describe how purposeful processing based on directed attention is in a state of tension with the obligatory, automatic processing of the unattended. One of the consequences of this tension is typically manifested in auditory distraction, but the benefits of processing of the attended may considerably outweigh this disadvantage.
注意力选择性对于生存以及机体对大脑信息流的有效管理至关重要；它是一种选择一种信息源来指导行动，同时忽略其他与当前行为目标无关信息的能力。但这种选择性并非仅仅是纳入相关信息并完全忽略无关信息。在本文中，我们讨论了所有声音都以一种强制性方式被处理的方式——无论相关与否——并探讨了在声音与当前心理任务无关的情况下其命运如何。使用所谓的无关声音范式，我们表明未被注意的信息既被登记又被组织。这种强制性的组织过程损害了特定类型心理活动的效率。我们讨论了这种干扰是如何产生的，但关键重点在于这种对无关信息的处理可能产生的有益影响，即让注意力的切换更加轻松和智能，并允许积累关于听觉世界统计规律的证据（例如那些有助于高效感知、获取和使用语言的规律）。总之，我们描述了基于定向注意力的有目的处理如何与对未被注意信息的强制性、自动处理处于一种紧张状态。这种紧张状态的一个后果通常表现为听觉分心，但对被注意信息的处理所带来的好处可能大大超过这个缺点。
