Human history has left us with people and celebrities whose echo of wisdom still impacts our modern world today. Many of their researches, works and studies, were the basis for the development of today’s knowledge.

In this article we will talk about a very relevant person in the field of cognitive psychology: Donald Broadbent. We will know who this researcher was through , a brief biography of Donald Broadbent , aspects of his scientific career, what were his most relevant contributions and on what he based these contributions.

Brief biography of Donald Broadbent

Donald Eric Broadbent FRS (Fellow Royal Society) was an experimental psychologist born in Birmingham in 1926 and died in 1993 at the age of 66. His career was focused on cognitive psychology , which is the area of psychology that focuses on cognition, that is, on those mental processes involved in knowledge.

As his name suggests, Donald was a member of the Royal Society. This is an honorary title awarded to senior scientists, who are nationals or residents of the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland (scientists of other nationalities may belong as foreign members). This title is chosen by the members of the Royal Society themselves, and implies that the members have made “a substantial contribution to the improvement of knowledge”.

Donald Broadbent focused his career on the scientific field of psychology. A 2002 survey conducted by the Review of General Psychology, a scientific journal of the American Psychological Association, ranked Broadbent as the 54th most cited psychologist, in terms of scientific articles, in the 20th century .

Career path

Donald Broadbent studied at the University of Cambridge, becoming in 1958 the director of the Applied Psychology Research Unit, a unit previously created by the UK Medical Research Council in 1994.

Much of his work focused on practical problems of the military or private industry, always combined with theoretical work. His professional career was recognised by his two theories: theory of selective attention and theory of short-term memory , carried out with the aid of the first computer tools, necessary for his analyses of human cognition.

Both theories are combined to form what is known as the Single Channel Hypothesis, called “Donald Broadbent’s Filter Model”. This concept proposes that the physical characteristics (e.g., tone) of an audio message are used to focus attention only on the particular message.

This implies that irrelevant messages are filtered out by the brain, before the information from the stimulus is processed for meaning.

Contributions to Cognitive Psychology

Donald Broadbent was one of the pioneers of cognitive psychology, also known as cognitivism . The term cognitive means the act of knowledge, which contemplates its actions of storing, retrieving, recognizing, understanding, organizing and using the information received through the senses.

This discipline of psychology focuses on the study of the basic and profound mechanisms through which knowledge is elaborated , from perception, memory and learning, to the elaboration of simple and complex concepts, as well as logical reasoning.

Donald Broadbent’s theories are built around cognitive psychology, and specifically, based on attention filtering models.

The Attentional Filter Model

The filter model is a theory of psychology that states that a person’s attention is focused on the information that is filtered through the brain. This consists of receiving some information, and from this information, a fragment will go to the sensory flow (that of the senses) and be processed in the central processing channel, and the other information will not (selective attention).

In the case of Donald Broadbent’s filter model, it is a filter that we call “precategorial”, that is, the filter goes before the semantic analysis of the information . In other words, the stimuli appear first, which are stored in the sensory area. And then the filter would act, which would select the information.

This information would be stored in short-term memory (a limited capacity channel), and eventually some information would be moved to long-term memory. The sensory memory retains the information temporarily.

The filter that is proposed is rigid and selective, since it chooses a fragment of the sensory flow and gives it access to the central channel, while the rest of the irrelevant information is lost .

Attention model research

Specifically, Donald Broadbent’s attentional filtering model postulates the existence of a theoretical filtering device, located in the brain, that relates the incoming sensory register and short-term memory storage.

This means that this filter allows the person to handle two types of stimuli displayed at the same time. So when two stimuli are received at the same time, one of them remains in standby in the brain for further processing, while the other is recorded . This filter avoids overloading the short-term memory.

This theory by Donald Broadbent was based on the following experiment: three pairs of different digits were presented simultaneously, three digits in one ear and another three digits in the other ear.

Most participants remembered the digits ear to ear, rather than pair to pair. For example, if 382 was presented in one ear and 497 in the other, participants remembered the number 382497 together, instead of 348927 (evenly).

Authors who leave a mark

They say that the difference between fame and prestige is that with fame, people know you; with prestige, however, it is the important people who know you. With this in mind, Donald Broadbent was a prestigious man, known for his contributions to experimental psychology and basic psychology.

This is demonstrated by the fact that he was a member of the Royal Society, and that annually, a conference in honor of Donald Broadbent takes place at the British Psychological Society.

In addition, his work led to two highly prestigious awards from the scientific community ; the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology in 1975, and the William James Award in 1989.

Bibliographic references:

  • Clavijo Gamero, R. and Pérez Díez, D.I. (2019). Manual for the preparation of the PIR examination. Internal Resident Psychologist. Mock examinations. Editorial Mad.
  • Moray, N. (1995). Donald E. Broadbent: 1926-1993. The American Journal of Psychology 108 (1): 117 – 121.
  • Redolar Ripoll, D. (2013). Cognitive neuroscience. Editorial Panamericana Spain. 1st Edition.
  • Reed Hunt, R. and Ellis, H. (2007). Fundamentals of cognitive psychology. Editorial Manual Moderno.