Divided Attention, Parallel Processing and

Divided attention (also known as dual attention) refers to a person's ability to split his or her attention between one or more different things simultaneously, such as cooking and watching TV. Parallel processing involves a person's ability to process information coming from different sources simultaneously. If a child looks at the clock while watching TV in order to answer a parent's question about how long until the show is over, the child is parallel processing the show on TV, the request for information, and the calculation of how long until show is over. Media scholars are interested in divided attention and parallel processing to better understand how children and adults process media messages. In addition, much of this research is concerned with designing better educational programming for children.

When a child watches television, he or she has a lot to do. First, several things may be occurring on the screen. For example, when a child watches Sesame Street, the Count von Count character may be counting bats while the number 7 appears on the screen and a news flash scrolls across the bottom of the screen. The child may focus on the Count, the bats being counted, the number 7, or the words scrolling across the screen. The child is also listening to the sound track for the show, which may include the Count's counting, the bats squeaking, and music. Further, the child must integrate the visual and auditory components of the television story into a coherent understanding of what is occurring on screen. In addition, there may be myriad things for the child to pay attention to in the larger environment, such as toys in the room, siblings who are running around, and parents yelling from the next room. Likewise, there are tactile sensations, such as the hardness or softness of the chair the child is sitting on, and there may be odors, such as the smell of cookies baking.

Clearly, the child cannot pay attention to all these various items in the environment. To how many things can a person attend at the same time? Theories of cognition address this question by examining the capacity of the cognitive system. The perceptual and cognitive systems are not capable of processing all the various stimuli in the environment, and introspection tells us that we are good at narrowing our attention to specific items. Most models of cognition posit the existence of working memory. Working memory is one's active processing of information relevant to what one is thinking about (e.g., the Count, the bats being counted, the number 7, and the smell of cookies baking in the next room). Some of the processing may be conscious, but much of the activity in working memory is unconscious. Most important, working memory is limited in what it can do at any point in time; there is only so much that a person can think about at a given point.

Because of the limitations of working memory, children must learn to attend to relevant things in their environment and to ignore other things that are not relevant to what they are doing. Of course, children [Page 247]also learn to divide their attention. For example, the child may be primarily focusing on the Count and the bats that are being counted. But the child may also be aware of the baking cookies, so his or her attention may be divided between these two tasks—understanding what is going on on the screen and determining when the cookies will be ready to eat.

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