Donald (Eric) Broadbent

British psychologist. He joined the scientific staff of the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Research Unit in Cambridge after World War 2 (director, 1949–58). A major figure in post-war experimental psychology, he was the most influential British psychologist in the movement to import ideas from communication theory and cybernetics into cognitive psychology. In 1974 he became a member of the external staff of the Medical Research Council, based in Oxford.

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. 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. 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.