Donald Broadbent

Donald Eric Broadbent (1926 to 1993) was a British experimental psychologist whose career and research bridged the pre-war approach of Sir Frederic Bartlett and the cognitive psychology that took shape in the late 1960s. Born in Birmingham, he studied experimental psychology at Cambridge under Bartlett, joined the Applied Psychology Unit on graduating in 1949 and became its director in 1958. His theories of selective attention and short-term memory, among the first to draw on computer analogies, were brought together in his 1958 book Perception and Communication, and his filter model of attention proposed that physical characteristics of an auditory message such as pitch and loudness select which single message is attended to, so that irrelevant messages are filtered out before meaning is processed. From 1974 he worked at Oxford, where he developed the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire and, with Dianne Berry, studied implicit learning. A 2002 survey ranked him the 54th most cited psychologist of the twentieth century.