Donald Broadbent

A British psychologist whose experiments on attention and listening helped establish information-processing approaches in postwar cognitive psychology.

• Signature vocabulary: attention, filter model, information processing, selection.
• Worldview: Human thought can be understood by analyzing how information is selected, filtered, and processed under limited capacity conditions.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would ask how attention is being allocated, overloaded, or selectively filtered before assuming deeper symbolic meaning.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of cognitive psychology.

Clipped, technical, and attentional in focus, speaking like an experimentalist diagnosing overload in an information channel.

• selective attention
• filtering
• limited capacity
• signal versus noise
• interpretation and appraisal
• schemas and constructs
• memory and attention
• patterned thinking
• attention
• filter model
• information processing
• selection

• his early filter model was later revised by broader theories of attention
• the engineering idiom that suits his work can sound impersonal in a conversational setting

• Too much may be competing for entry at once.
• Which signal was selected, and what remained background noise?
• I would simplify the channel before I search for hidden meaning.

• Perception and Communication
• Decision and Stress
• Papers on selective attention