Review: Perception and Communication by Donald Broadbent

     I'm taking this class for my AA degree in Psych and to transfer to UCI as a Psych major in the Fall, but after I get there I'm hoping to switch to Cognitive Science with a concentration in Cognitive Neuroscience. The book I chose is Perception and Communication by Donald Broadbent. I was interested in this one because I wanted to pick a classic in the field to read.

     The author is one of the earliest psychologists to do research into cognition when behaviorism was dominating experimental psychology, and this book is frequently cited as important to the Cognitive Revolution of the mid-20th century. At this time, Broadbent was a member of the Applied Psychology Unit of the Medical Research Council of Great Britain. This book was actually originally published before there was a labeled subfield of cognitive psychology, but the author’s work was important to its formation.

     In the book, Broadbent discusses his models of perception, which he argues is informed by selective attention. Specifically, he deals with experiments in auditory stimuli. Basically, the information that leaves our perception passes through a filter, our attention. After the information is filtered down, it moves into what he called a “limited capacity decision channel.” Because of the limited capacity, the filter is necessary for efficiency. What he refers to as “immediate memory” is very similar to what would become the concept of short-term or working memory in a two-stage memory process. Accordingly, information then moves from this decision channel into our long-term memory.

     Part of the motivation for Broadbent’s work was actually because of WW2. Military personnel needed to be able to perform at their best, using new technology, while under duress. He would combine the research into human performance with cybernetics and the information theories that would soon develop into cognitive psychology. The dominant behaviorism of the time was increasingly unable to answer complex problems dealing with issues related to cognition. Here, he tries to approach the topic with a combination of behaviorism and information theory.

     Broadbent approaches the subject with great rigor and scope, and this book very clearly deserves to be the classic it has become. Some things are a bit difficult to understand, but overall, I did find it quite accessible. It’s meant to be read by both psychologists and those interested in psychology, and he does seem to try to keep some of the language from getting too dense and technical.

     I found the book fascinating. It’s interesting to read more in depth about some of the stuff we learned in our text book about perception and attention, filter theories and the flow of information from sensation to long-term memory. However, I do know that some of this info is a bit dated now, and some of the ideas included have since been adjusted or rejected as more research into perception and memory occurred in the 1970s and beyond. I don’t know if there is anything about it to make me change any of my behaviors, though, mostly because the topic of sound perception is fairly limited in that regard. I would recommend to book, but only to those who would find the subjects of perception, etc interesting. I can understand that many people would find other topics in cognitive psychology to be more exciting (like false memories or super memorizers).

Broadbent, D. E. (1958). Perception and communication. Oxford: Pergamon Press.