Cherry developed the shadowing task in order to further study how people selectively attend to one message amid other voices and noises.
This shows that infants selectively attend to specific stimuli in their environment.
In this model, auditory information can be selectively attended to on the basis of its physical characteristics, such as location and volume.
Even more strikingly, the ERP will vary according to whether or not we are selectively attending to it.
A specificity effect of attention has also been noted, with individuals attending selectively to threats related to their particular disorder.
For example, those with social phobia selectively attend to social threats but not physical threats.
The attention/arousal process involves selectively attending to a particular stimulus, ignoring distractions, and maintaining vigilance.
Second, in conjunction with this environmental help, children selectively attend to stressed elements of the adult utterance and, to a large extent, ignore the rest.
It is therefore important to selectively attend to relevant information and ignore irrelevant information in order to have the greatest success at remembering.
Alternatively, subjects might selectively attend to initial information and ignore later, incompatible information.