The Role of Attention in Behavior

     Attention is taking notice or focusing on a certain figure, conversation, or really anything in the world. Many people don't know, however, that there are different types of attention, such as selective attention and selective inattention. Selective attention is defined as "the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus." Of 11,000,000 bits of information our sense take in from the environment per second, only 40 are consciously processed. This is due to selective attention, which strongly affects behavior. Without the ability to block the 10,999,960 bits of stimuli that we don't process, we'd go insane trying to process every part of our world.
     Selective attention results in selective inattention, which is the part of the environmental stimulus that we do not consciously process. Inattentional blindness, a type of selective inattention, is when people fail to see visible objects when their attention is directed somewhere else. A form of inattentional blindness is called change blindness, when is when people fail to notice changes in the environment.
     In regards to behavior, our behavior heavily relies on what part of our environment we pay attention to. Focusing on negative experiences instead of positive ones will most likely mold a pessimistic person. Not paying attention to what your friend is saying will most likely make you ignorant when they bring the subject up again. So, how/what we consciously process shapes our behavior, even if we don't consciously know it.