Donald Broadbent

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Donald E. Broadbent (Birmingham, 1926-April 10, 1993) was an influential British experimental psychologist. His career and his research work bridged the gap between the pre-Second World War approach of Sir Frederick Bartlett and its wartime development into applied psychology, and what from the late 1960s became known as cognitive psychology.

Educated at the University of Cambridge, in 1958 he became director of the Applied Psychology Research Unit which had been set up there by the UK Medical Research Council on Bartlett's persuasion in 1944. Although much of the work of the APRU was directed at practical issues of military or industrial significance, Broadbent rapidly became well known for his theoretical work. His theories of selective attention and short-term memory were developed as digital computers were beginning to become available to the academic community, and were among the first to use computer analogies to make a serious contribution to the analysis of human cognition. They were combined to form what became known as the "single channel hypothesis". His Filter Model proposed that the physical characteristics (e.g., pitch, loudness) of an auditorily presented message were used to focus attention to only a single message. Broadbent's Filter model is referred to as an early selection model because irrelevant messages are filtered out before the stimulus information is processed for meaning. These and other theories were brought together in his 1958 book "Perception and Communication" which remains one of the classic texts of cognitive psychology. In 1974 Broadbent became a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and returned to applied problems, developing new ideas about implicit learning from consideration of human performance in complex industrial processes along with his colleague Dianne Berry

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Publications by Donald Broadbent (bibliography)

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» 1990 «

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Berry, Dianne C. and Broadbent, Donald (1990): The Role of Instruction and Verbalization in Improving Performance on Complex Search Tasks. In Behaviour and Information Technology, 9 (3) pp. 175-190

This paper examines methods of improving human search performance on a diagnostic task where it does not help to provide computer suggestions about the next enquiry to make. In three experiments it was found (a) that verbal instruction in optimal procedures was ineffective in changing actual performance, although it changed answers to verbal tests of knowledge; (b) that requiring people to say aloud the reasons for each action was ineffective in changing either performance or verbal tests of knowledge; but if people were given both verbal instructions and the requirements to justify each action aloud, performance was improved; (c) this successful training method changed performance not merely on the specific task that was trained, but also on a superficially different search task in which the same general procedures were optimal. These findings suggest that human decision processes change if key information is temporarily activated at the time it is needed, but not if it is merely learned at an irrelevant time. Such a process also explains the beneficial effect of interfaces that provide explanation or the results of inference at key points in the task.

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» 1975 «

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Broadbent, Donald (1975): The magic number seven after fifteen years. In: Kennedy, Alan and Wilkes, Alan "Studies in Long-Term Memory". Wiley p. 1975

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» 1958 «

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Broadbent, Donald (1958): Perception and Communication. Oxford, England, Pergamon

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Changes to this page (author)

18 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Donald Broadbent's author page.
07 Feb 2008: Page was edited
07 Feb 2008: Page was edited
07 Feb 2008: Author was edited
28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography

Publication statistics

Publication period:1958-1990
Publication count:3
Number of co-authors:1



Productive colleagues

Donald Broadbent's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:

Dianne C. Berry:3


Collaboration count

Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:

Dianne C. Berry:1

 

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Mar 12

People shouldn’t have to read a manual to open a door, even if it is only one word long (push/pull).

-- Don Norman

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