Donald Broadbent: Brief Biography of This Cognitive Psychologist

The history of humanity has left us with people and celebrities whose echo of wisdom still impacts our modern world today. Many of his investigations, works and studies of him, 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 short biography of donald broadbent, aspects of his scientific career, what were his most relevant contributions and what he based these contributions on.

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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 indicates, Donald was a Fellow of the Royal Society. This is an honorary title awarded to high-level scientists, nationals or residents of the Kingdom Kingdom or Republic of Ireland (scientists of other nationalities may belong as members foreign). This title is chosen by the members of the Royal Society themselves, and implies that members have made "a substantial contribution to the improvement of knowledge".

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

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Career path

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

Much of his work focused on practical problems in the military or private industry, always combined with theoretical work. His career was recognized for the two theories of him: theory of Selective Attention and theory of short-term memory, made with the help of early computing tools, necessary for their analyzes 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 (eg pitch) of an auditory message are used to focus attention only on the particular message.

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

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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, retrieve, recognize, understand, organize and use the information received through the senses.

This discipline of psychology focuses on the study of the basic and deep 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 elaborated around cognitive psychology, and specifically, based on attention filter models.

The attentional filter model

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

In the case of Donald Broadbent's filter model, it is a filter that we call “precategorical”, 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 later the filter would act, which would select the information.

This information would be stored in short-term memory (a channel of limited capacity), and eventually some information would go to long-term memory. Sensory memory retains information temporarily.

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

Investigation of the attentional model

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

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 on standby in the brain for further processing, while the other is registered. This filter prevents short-term memory overload.

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

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

Authors who leave their mark

They say that the difference between fame and prestige is that with fame, people know you; with prestige, on the other hand, it is the important people who know you. Taking this into account, 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.

Besides, His work led him to obtain 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 exam. Resident Internal Psychologist. Mock exams. 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.
• ReedHunt, R. and Ellis, H. (2007). Fundamentals of cognitive psychology. Modern Manual Editorial.