Final answer:
Selective attention is when a consumer chooses to concentrate on specific stimuli while ignoring others. This process is essential for focusing on relevant tasks and filtering out distractions, but can sometimes lead to inattentional blindness, as demonstrated by the gorilla experiment by Simons and Chabris.
Step-by-step explanation:
When a consumer chooses to focus on certain stimuli while excluding others, selective attention occurs. This psychological process allows individuals to concentrate on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other stimuli. Selective attention is a crucial part of perception, where we focus our cognitive resources on a particular object or task at hand, enabling us to filter out unneeded or distracting information.
An example of selective attention can be found in a famous study by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, where participants focused on counting basketball passes and missed seeing a person in a gorilla suit walk through the scene — a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness.
This concept is also related to signal detection theory, which reflects our ability to detect a stimulus amidst background noise depending on factors such as motivation or expectations. Attention is a powerful tool that both enhances our ability to perceive what is important for our goals or tasks and filters out irrelevant information, which can sometimes lead to missing unexpected but visible objects.