The effects of noise and incentives upon attention in short-term memory

Recent work concerned with task performance under conditions of high arousal has emphasized the changes that appear to occur in the allocation of attention to different components of the task. Hockey (1970 a, b), for example, has shown that loud noise, which may be considered to raise arousal level (Broadbent, 1971; Davies, 1968; Hockey, 1969), biases attention towards high-priority task components and away from low-prioposed that an increase in arousal level brings about a restriction of the range of cues trity ones. This result agrees with a suggestion made by Easterbrook (1959), who proposed that an increase in arousal level brings about a restriction of the range of cues that a subject utilizes in performing a task. Easterbrook arg ued that when arousal level is low, selectivity in the utilization of cues is also low, and irrelevant cues may be accepted uncritically. As arousal level increases, so does selectivity, and attention is diverted away from irrelevant task components. Further increases in arousal diminish still further the range of usable cues, so that eventually some relevant cues are no longer utilized and task performance deteriorates.