Donald Broadbent

From New World Encyclopedia

Donald Eric Broadbent (May 6, 1926 - April 10, 1993) was an influential English experimental psychologist, most famous for his filter model of attention. Influenced by his time in the Royal Air Force, Broadbent abandoned his career path towards engineering in favor of studying psychology, with particular attention to communication. Broadbent helped nurture what was then the infact field of psychology in England, becoming famous worldwide not only for his groundbreaking theories but also for his polite, good natured manner. His career and his research work bridged the gap between the pre-Second World War approach of Sir Frederic Bartlett and its wartime development, into applied psychology, and what from the late 1960s became known as cognitive psychology.

Life

Donald Broadbent was born on May 6, 1926 in Birmingham, England. His family was quite well off financially, but his situation changed when his parents divorced when he was 13 and his home moved to Wales. He won a scholarship to the prestigious Winchester College, an English independent school.

As a boy he was fascinated by flying, and at age 17 he volunteered to join the Royal Air Force (RAF). During his time in the RAF, he observed communication difficulties often arose from psychological, not physical, causes. In particular, he noticed that inefficient processes of attention, perception, and memory were the causes of difficulties, rather than any failures of technical equipment. An anecdote he often told to illustrate the importance of psychological processes in practice was recounted by his long-time colleague, Dianne Berry:

The AT6 planes had two identical levers under the seat, one to pull up the flaps and one to pull up the wheels. Donald told of the monotonous regularity with which his colleagues would pull the wrong lever while taking off and crash land an expensive aeroplane in the middle of a field (Berry 2002).

Having made this observation, Broadbent's interests began to zero in on psychology, rather than his previous interest in the physical sciences. Psychology too had the "concrete" quality of the physical sciences but it could also shed light on human problems.

Broadbent spent a short time after the war working in the personnel selection branch of the RAF before beginning to his studies at Cambridge's psychology department. Due to its natural sciences orientation and its emphasis on practical application, Broadbent (and scores of other future psychologists) found Cambridge to be the ideal place. The department was headed by Sir Frederick Bartlett and was eager to apply newfound cybernetic ideals towards understanding human behavior, especially in terms of control systems, practical problems, and psychological theory in general. Broadbent found his place in the Applied Psychology Unit there.

In 1958, Broadbent became director of the Unit for Research in Applied Psychology which had been set up there by the UK Medical Research Council on Bartlett's persuasion in 1944. Although much of the work of the Unit was directed at practical issues of military or industrial significance, Broadbent rapidly became well known for his theoretical work. His theories of selective attention and short-term memory were developed as digital computers were beginning to become available to the academic community, and were among the first to use computer analogies to make a serious contribution to the analysis of human cognition. Broadbent remained director at the Unit for 25 years, until 1974.

During this time, he also looked at problems caused by communication with gunnery and air control systems, in which many channels of communication were delivered at one time. This research contributed favorably to his research on attention and noise (something which, up until then, were considered unrelated). His research suggested that, although most people spend their lives surrounded by many different types of stimuli, they cannot respond to or describe the majority of them.

Broadbent's Filter model is referred to as an "early selection" model because irrelevant messages are filtered out before the stimulus information is processed for meaning. These and other theories were brought together in his 1958 book, Perception and Communication, which became one of the classic texts of cognitive psychology.

In 1974, Broadbent became a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University and returned to applied problems, developing new ideas about implicit learning from consideration of human performance in complex industrial processes along with his colleague Dianne Berry. He continued this work until his retirement in 1991.

Donald Broadbent died on April 10, 1993.

Work

Broadbent is best known for two major contributions to the world of psychology. The first is his dichotic listening experiments and the second, and perhaps most famous, is his filter model of attention, both of which were developed during his time at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge University.

Dichotic listening experiments

These experiments were concerned with the subject's ability to answer one of two questions posed at the same time—one of which was irrelevant. Broadbent took five groups of listeners and made them listen to two overlapping messages. One of those messages was directed towards "S-1," while the other addressed either S-2, S-3, S-4, S-5, or S-6. Group 1, for example, was instructed to answer the message for S-1 and ignore the others. The other four groups were given similar commands, varying the complexity of the task to be carried out. Groups that were told what to pay attention to after the messages had already been said had a nearly useless recall. Groups that had advance knowledge of what to pay attention to recalled at a rate of roughly 48 percent.

As Broadbent himself said:

The present case is an instance of selection in perception (attention). Since the visual cue to the correct voice is useless when it arrives towards the ends of the message, it is clear that process of discarding part of the information contained in the mixed voices has already taken place…It seems possible that one of the two voices is selected for response without reference to its correctness, and that the other is ignored…If one of the two voices is selected (attended to) in the resulting mixture there is no guarantee that it will be the correct one, and both call signs cannot be perceived at once any more than both messages can be received and stored till a visual cue indicates the one to be answered.

Filter model of attention

Broadbent's filter model of attention accounts for a theoretical filter device, which is located in between the incoming sensory register, and the short-term memory storage. His theory is based upon the multi-storage paradigm of William James (1890) and the later Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model (1968). This filter functions together with a buffer, and enables the subject to handle two kinds of stimuli, presented at the same time. One of the inputs is allowed through the filter, while the other is waiting in the buffer for later processing. The filter prevents overloading of the limited capacity mechanism beyond the filter, which is the short-term memory (Broadbent 1958).

It is based on the famous cocktail party problem of the British scientist Colin Cherry, who is trying to explain how people are able to focus their attention towards the stimuli which they find most interesting (Cherry 1953). The idea is that one is able to hear his name called out on the floor of a party, separate from the rest of the noise. The paradox here is that one is aware of the content before it is processed. Broadbent came up with the theory based on data from an experiment where three pairs of different digits are presented simultaneously, three digits in one ear and three in the other. Most participants in the study recalled the digits ear by ear, rather than pair by pair. Thus, if 496 were presented to one ear and 852 to the other, the recall would be 496852 rather than 489562. This effectively solved that paradox.

But some would called Broadbent's solution simplistic or "all-or-nothing." In Broadbent's model, every message must be attended to; it is simply a matter of order. Later models would allow for the "unattended message." In addition, later models would introduce two or three stages of filtering.

Legacy

After his death in 1993, tributes and biographical acknowledgments were written in honor of Broadbent. A special issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology, edited by his long time colleague Diane Berry, was written to commemorate his contributions (Berry 1995). He is remembered for the unmistakable image that he projected of himself, as “the man, the scholar, the scientist, the philosopher of science, and of his commitments to empirical psychology, to explicit models or theories, and to the application of psychological knowledge to real-word problems” (Massaro 1996, 141). It is with this clear image in mind that a new generation of psychologists set forth, using Broadbent’s principles of experimental psychology as tools for practical application and research in the area of attention, and more broadly, all psychological processes that influence humankind.

Broadbent’s contributions to experimental psychology were noteworthy not only for attention research, but because they also contributed to belief in the need for societal relevance in research—that is, practical application. Broadbent's background in natural sciences and engineering, and his subsequent practical work with the RAF on noise and communication, developed in him a passion for applied psychological work. In addition, his informal speaking style and use of commonplace analogies to represent complicated ideas, made him memorable society as a whole, allowing people of all walks of life access to his theories. As stated by Craik and Baddeley (1995, 303), Broadbent’s "psychology was intended for society and its problems, not merely for the dwellers in ivory towers."

A lecture in Broadbent's honor is given every year at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society. Broadbent gave the inaugural lecture in 1991.

Important works

  • Broadbent, Donald E. Perception and Communication. Elsevier Science Ltd, 1958. ISBN 0080090907
  • Broadbent, Donald E. Behavior Basic Books, 1961. ISBN 0465005993
  • Broadbent, Donald E. "Attention and the Perception of Speech." Scientific American, 206 (1962): 143-51.
  • Broadbent, Donald E. In Defense of Empirical Psychology. Methuen young books, 1973. ISBN 041676780X
  • Broadbent, Donald E. The Simulation of Human Intelligence (Wolfson College Lectures). Blackwell, 1993. ISBN 0631185879
  • Broadbent, Donald E., and James T. Reason (eds.). 1990. Human Factors in Hazardous Situations. Oxford University Press. ISBN 019852191X
  • Pribram, Karl H., and Donald E. Broadbent (eds.). Biology of Memory. Academic Press, 1970. ISBN 0125643500

References
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  • Berry, Dianne C. (ed.). 1995. Special Issue: Donald Broadbent and Applied Cognitive Psychology. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 9(7): S1-S215.
  • Cherry, Colin E. 1953. Some experiments on the recognition of speech with one and two ears. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25: 975-979.
  • Hothersall, David. 2003. History of Psychology. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0072849657
  • Parasuraman, Raja. Profiles in Psychology: Donald Broadbent C S L Notes 20 (September 1996) Retrieved September 8, 2008.
  • Baddeley, Alan, and Lawrence Weiskrantz (eds.). 1995. Attention: Selection, Awareness and Control. A Tribute to Donald Broadbent. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198523742
  • Craik, Fergus I. M., and Alan Baddeley. 1995. Donald E. Broadbent (1926-1993). American Psychologist, 50(4): 302-303.
  • Craik, Fergus I. M. 2000. "Broadbent, Donald E." Encyclopaedia of Psychology, 1: 476-477.
  • Massaro, D. W. 1996. "Attention: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow." American Journal of Psychology, 109(1): 139-150.
  • Moray, N. 1995. Donald E. Broadbent: 1926-1993. American Journal of Psychology, 108: 117-121.
  • Berry, Diane. 2002. Donald Broadbent The Psychologist (15)(8) (August 2002): 402-405. Retrieved October 20, 2008.

External links

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