Introduction 1

What is attention?
Any reader who turns to a book with the word “attention” in the title
might be forgiven for thinking that the author would have a clear idea
or precise definition of what “attention” actually is. Unfortunately,
attention remains a concept that psychologists find difficult to define.
William James (1890) told us that: “Everyone knows what attention is.
It is the taking possession of mind in clear and vivid form . . . it
implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with
others.” However, it would be closer to the truth to say that “Nobody
knows what attention is” or at least not all psychologists agree. The
problem is that “attention” is not a single concept, but an umbrella
term for a variety of psychological phenomena. Shiffrin (1988, p. 739)
provides a more precise definition: “Attention has been used to refer
to all those aspects of human cognition that the subject can control . . .
and to all aspects of cognition having to do with limited resources or
capacity, and methods of dealing with such constraints.” However,
“all” is used twice here, suggesting that, even within this definition,
there are many aspects of attention involved. There is, however,
some agreement that attention is characterised by a limited capacity
for processing information and that this allocation can be intentionally
controlled. Desimone and Duncan (1995, p. 193) capture the proper-
ties of visual attention, and say that: “The first basic phenomenon is
limited capacity for processing information. At any given time only
a small amount of the information available on the retina can be
processed and used.” Certainly, we have the subjective feeling that
although we may be able to choose what we attend to in vision, there
is a severe limitation on the amount of information that we can attend
to at any one moment. We can only look in one direction at a time and
only take in part of the visual scene. These are central characteristics
of human performance, with which we are all subjectively familiar
and for which there is a large body of empirical evidence. So, in this
sense, we do know what attention is. Does this capture all varieties of
attention? What if, while you look in one direction, you also listen to a

1. INTRODUCTION 1
 conversation behind you? Can you choose to look in one direction but
attend to something else “out of the corner of your eye”? To what
extent can attention be allocated according to behaviourial goals?
In Shiffrin’s definition, the subject is given the role of control. This is
not a very scientific explanation and as we shall see in the chapters
that follow, the nature of attentional control is the subject of some
debate.
It is evident that “attention” is a term used to refer to different
phenomena and processes, not only by psychologists, but also in
common usage of the word. This seems to have been the case
throughout the history of psychology. The same word is applied to
different aspects of situations and experiences in everyday speech
and defined differently by different psychologists. One of the reasons
for the rise of the behaviourist movement in psychology was the
difficulty psychologists at the turn of the 20th century were having in
formulating precise definitions of terms such as “attention” and “con-
sciousness”. Psychology had grown out of mental philosophy to
become the “science of mind”, but unless it was clear what was meant
by the terms used in explanations, psychology could not be truly
scientific. The famous behaviourist J. B. Watson (1919) wrote:

If I were to ask you to tell me what you mean by the terms

you have been in the habit of using I could soon make
you tongue-tied. I believe I could even convince you that
you do not know what you mean by them. You have been
using them uncritically as a part of your social and literary
tradition. (p. 6)

Behaviourism aimed to purge psychology of its use of everyday

psychological terms and provide a true science of behaviour without
recourse to any intervening variables in the “mind”. The problem for
psychologists of the behaviourist tradition was that the “mind” was
not so easy to banish from explanations of human performance.
Behaviour could be scientifically observed and stimulus–response
relationships discovered, but unobservable internal mechanisms
such as “attention”, however poorly defined, which evidently allow
adaptive goal directed behaviour could not be experimented on.
They were not amenable to explanation in terms of simple stimulus
response associations.
Treisman (1964d), who was one of the most important contributors
to the development of theories of attention, started her paper
“Selective attention in man” by saying:

2 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATTENTION

 Fifty years ago psychologists thought of attention as “the
focalisation of consciousness” or “the increased clearness
of a particular idea”. But these and other definitions in
terms of mental faculties or subjective experience proved
sterile for empirical research and ended in a series of in-
conclusive controversies. Recently interest in this problem
has revived.

She goes on to identify the practical need to understand atten-

tion, the development of the information processing approach to
psychology, which provides a metaphor for modelling internal pro-
cesses and advances in understanding the neurophysiological bases
of attention as important factors in this revival. Behaviourism fell
from favour and the cognitive approach, in which humans were seen
as information processors, took over as the predominant metaphor of
mind. The cognitive approach provided a scientific way of modelling
the intervening variables between stimulus and response. So, where
are we after nearly another 50 years? This is what this book is about.

Varieties of attention
Attention is not of one kind, so rather than searching for a single
definition, we need to consider attention as having a number of dif-
ferent varieties. Perhaps we cannot understand what attention is until
we accept this. Allport (1993, p. 203) points out the problem that the
same term “attention” refers to a wide range of situations:

It seems no more plausible that there should be one unique

mechanism, or computational resource, as the causal
basis of all attentional phenomena, than there should be
a unitary basis of thought, or perception or of any other
traditional category of folk psychology.

Let’s use a scenario from everyday life to illustrate the problem. We

are out walking in a wood and I tell you that I have just noticed an
unusual variety of butterfly land on the back of the leaf in a nearby
tree. I point out the tree and where about the leaf is and tell you to pay
attention to it. Following my instruction, you select one tree from
many. You then “attend” to a particular leaf, rather than the tree itself,
so presumably you and I share some common understanding of what
attention is. You continue to look carefully, hoping you will see the
butterfly when it moves out from behind the leaf. Now, you will try

1. INTRODUCTION 3
 and keep your attention on that leaf so as not to miss the butterfly
when it appears. In addition, you will have some expectation of what
the butterfly will look like and how it may behave and be monitoring
for these features. This expectation and anticipation will activate what
psychologists call top-down processes, which will enable you to be
more ready to respond if a butterfly appears, rather than some
dissimilar animal, say, a caterpillar.
However, if while you are selectively focusing attention on the leaf
an apple suddenly falls out of another part of the tree, you will be
distracted. In other words, your attention will be automatically
captured by the apple. In order to continue observing the leaf, you
must re-engage your attention to where it was before. After a time
you detect the beautiful butterfly as it flutters round the leaf, it sits a
minute and you watch it as it flies away.
In this example, we have a variety of attentional phenomena that
psychologists need to understand, and if possible explain, in well-
defined scientific terms. We will see that no single term is appropriate
to explain all the phenomena of attention and control even in this
visual task. Let’s look at what you were asked to do. First of all, you
translated the spoken words into an intention to move your eyes in
the direction of my pointing finger. You then were able to search
among the branches and leaves to attend to a particular leaf. In order
to do this “simple” task, there had to be some kind of setting up of
your cognitive system that enabled one tree, then the leaves rather
than tree, to become the current object of processing. Finally, one
particular leaf was selected over others on the basis of its spatial
location. Once you are focusing on the leaf, you are expecting
butterfly-type shapes to emerge and may occasionally think you have
detected the butterfly if an adjacent leaf flutters in the breeze. Here the
perceptual input triggers, bottom up, one of the attributes of butterfly,
fluttering, that has been primed by your expectations and for a
moment you are misled. The idea of “mental set” is an old one. Many
experiments on attention use a selective set paradigm, where the sub-
ject prepares to respond to a particular set of stimuli. The notion of
selection brings with it the complementary notion of ignoring some
stimuli at the expense of those that are selected for attentional pro-
cessing. What makes selection easy or difficult is an important
research area and has exercised psychologists for decades. Here we
immediately run into the first problem: Is attention the internal setting
of the system to detect or respond to a particular set of stimuli (in our
example, butterflies) the same as the attention that you “pay” or allo-
cate to the stimulus once it is detected? It seems intuitively unlikely.

4 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATTENTION

Which of these kinds of attention is captured by the unexpected
falling apple? We already have one word for two different aspects of
the task. A second issue arises when the apple falls from the tree and
you are momentarily distracted. We said your attention was auto-
matically drawn to the apple, so although you were intending to
attend to the leaf and focusing on its spatial location, there appears to
be an interrupt process that automatically detects novel, possibly
important, environmental changes outside the current focus of atten-
tion and draws attention to themselves. An automatic process is one
that is defined as not requiring attention although, of course, if we are
not certain how to define attention, this makes the definition of auto-
matic processes problematic. Note now, another problem: I said that
you have to return attention to the leaf you were watching, what does
this mean? Somehow, the temporary activation causing the apple to
attract attention can be voluntarily overridden by the previously
active goal of leaf observation. You have remembered what you were
doing and attention can then be directed, by some internal process or
mechanism, back to the original task. To say that you, the subject, can
voluntarily control this, as Shiffrin (1988) did in his definition, tells us
nothing, we might as easily appeal to there being a little-man-in-the-
head, or homunculus, on which many theories seem to rely.
To continue with the scenario, if you have to sustain attention on
the leaf, monitoring for the butterfly for more than a few minutes,
it may become increasingly difficult to stop your attention from
wandering. You have difficulty concentrating, there seems to be effort
involved in keeping to the task at hand. Finally the butterfly appears,
you detect it, in its spatial location, but as soon as it flies away, you
follow it, as if your attention is not now directed to the location that
the butterfly occupied but to the object of the butterfly itself. The
question of whether visual attention is spatially based or object based
is another issue that researchers are interested in.
Of course, visual attention is intimately related to where we are
looking and to eye movements, so perhaps there is nothing much to
explain here, we just attend to what we are looking at. However, we
all know that we can “look out of the corner of the eye”. If while you
fixate your gaze on this *, you are able to tell me quite a lot about the
spatial arrangement of the text on the page and what the colours of
the walls are, so it is not the case that where we direct our eyes and
where we direct attention are one and the same. In vision, there
appears to be an obvious limit on how much information we can take
in, at least from different spatial locations, simply because it is not
possible to look in two directions at once. Although even when

1. INTRODUCTION 5
 attending to one visual location, the question arises of how we
selectively attend to one attribute from a number of sources of
spatially coincident information, it is possible to attend to either the
colour or the shape of the butterfly.
Auditory attention also seems to be limited. However, unlike our
eyes, we cannot move our ears to select a location or search the
environment. Of course, some animals can do this, you only have to
watch an alert cat to know this. However, even though we do not
physically move our ears to allow one sound source to be focused on,
and therefore all sounds will be picked up, we can select what to
listen to. In fact, when there are several different streams of sound
emanating from different locations around us, the traffic outside, the
hum of the computer on the desk, the conversation in the room next
door, we do not appear to be able to listen to them all at once. Our
inability to direct the auditory sensory apparatus mechanically cannot
be the reason we cannot listen to two things at once. There must be
another reason.
We all know that we can selectively listen to the intriguing conver-
sation on the next table in the restaurant, even though there is another
conversation, continuing on the table we are sitting at. This is an
example of selective auditory attention and a version of the “cocktail
party problem”. Somehow, internal processes can allow one set of
auditory information to gain precedence over the rest. Listening to a
conversation in noise is clearly easier if we know something about the
content. Some words may be masked by other noises, but our top-
down expectations enable us to fill in the gaps, we say that there is
redundancy in language, meaning that there is more information
present than is strictly necessary. We make use of this redundancy in
difficult conditions. If the conversation were of a technical nature, on
some topic about which we knew very little, there would be much less
top-down expectation and the conversation would be more difficult to
follow. Although we may be intent on the conversation at the next
table, a novel or important sound will capture our attention, rather
like the visual example of the apple falling out of the tree. However, as
in vision, we are not easily able to monitor both sources of information
at once, if we are distracted, we must return our attention back to the
conversation.
Now we have another question: Is the attention that we use in
vision the same as that that we use in audition? While it is difficult to
do two visual or two auditory tasks concurrently it is not necessarily
difficult to combine an auditory and a visual task. Of course, this is
evolutionarily sensible. We need to know that the face we see moving

6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATTENTION

in front of our eyes is the source of the words we are hearing or not, as
the case may be. Attending to the moving lips of a speaker can help us
disambiguate what is being said, especially in noise. We like people to
look at us when they are speaking to us. While most research has been
involved with vision and hearing, we can, of course, attend to smells,
tastes, sensations and proprioceptive information. To date we know
far less about these areas but we all know that a painful stimulus such
as a bee sting will capture attention and a nagging headache cannot
easily be ignored. The very term “nagging” suggests this constant
reminding of its presence. Attention to pain is important for self-
preservation and survival, but people with chronic pain can be
compromised in performing other tasks because the pain demands
attention. The question of why some tasks interfere with each other,
while others seem capable of being performed independently, and
how we are able to share or divide attention, may crucially depend on
the modality of input and output as well as the kind of information
processing that is required in the two tasks.
So, why do some tasks or kinds of processing require attention
but others do not. While you were looking for butterflies, we may
have been walking and talking at the same time. It is possible to
continue eating dinner in the restaurant at the same time as listening
to a conversation. Walking, talking and eating seem to proceed with-
out attention, until the ground becomes uneven, a verbal problem is
posed or your peas fall off your fork. At these moments, you might
find one task has to stop while attention is allocated to the other.
Consider learning a skill such as juggling. To begin with, we seem to
need all our attention (ask yourself which kind of attention this might
be) to throw and catch two balls. The prospect of ever being able to
operate on three at once seems rather distant! However, with practice,
using two balls becomes easy, we may even be able to hold a con-
versation at the same time. Now introduce the third ball, gradually
this too becomes possible, although to start with we cannot talk at the
same time. Finally, we can talk and juggle three balls. So, now it seems
that the amount of attention needed by a task depends on skill, which
is learned over practice. Once attention is no longer needed for the
juggling we can attend to something else. However, if the juggler
goes wrong, the conversation seems to have to stop while a correction
is made to the ball throwing. It is as if attention is being allocated
or withdrawn according to the combined demands of the tasks. In
this example, attention seems to be either a limited “amount” of
something or some kind of “effort”. Accordingly, some theorists
have likened attention to resources or effort, while others have been

1. INTRODUCTION 7
 more concerned with where a limiting attentional step operates
within the processing system to select some information for further
processing.
Memory is intimately related to attention. We seem to remember
what we have attended to. “I’m sorry I was not paying attention to the
colour of her dress, I was listening to what she said.” Although you
must have seen the dress, and, in fact, assume that she was wearing a
dress, you do not remember anything about it. If we want to be sure
someone remembers what we are telling them, we ask them to pay
attention. How attentional processing affects memory, as well as how
a concurrent memory task affects attention, are other important
issues. However, there is evidence that a considerable amount of
processing is carried out without attention being necessary and
without the subject having any memory of the event. Although the
subject may not be explicitly able to recall, at a conscious level, that
some particular information was present, subsequent testing can
demonstrate that the “unattended” stimuli have had an effect, by
biasing or priming, subsequent responses.
Note that for a stimulus to be apparently “unattended” it seems to
have to be “unconscious”. This brings us to another thorny question:
What is the relationship of attention to conscious experience? Like
attention, consciousness has a variety of meanings. We usually say we
are conscious of what we are attending to. What we are attending to is
currently in short-term or working memory. What is in short-term
memory is what we are consciously thinking about at that moment
in time. Here, I hope you see the problems of definition, if we are
not careful we find ourselves ensnared in circularity. Memory and
attention are also closely interwoven when planning and monitoring
day-to-day activities. Have you ever gone to make a cup of tea and
poured the tea into the sugar bowl? The correct actions have been
performed but not on the correct objects. This sort of “slip of action”
often arises when we are “not paying attention” to what we are doing.
When we engage in a complex sequentially ordered set of actions
to achieve a goal, like making a cup of tea, not only do we have to
remember the overall goal, but we must also monitor and update the
steps that have been taken towards goal completion, sometimes
updating goal states as we go. In this example, we may have to stop
and wash out the sugar bowl before continuing, but will not have to
go right back to the beginning of the goal sequence where we filled the
kettle. Attention in the control of action is an example of another kind
of attention, driven by goals, or what we intend to do. The question
of the intentional, voluntary control, where behaviour is planned

8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATTENTION

according to current goals and instructions is a growing area of
research in the attention literature.
Rather than labour the point further, let us accept that to try and
define attention as a unitary concept is not possible and to do so
would be misleading. Perhaps the best approach is to look at experi-
mental situations that we all agree involve one or another application
of some sort of “attention” and from the data obtained, together with
what we now know about the organisation of the underlying neuro-
physiology and the breakdown of normal function following brain
damage, try to infer something about the psychological processes or
mechanisms underlying the observed behaviour.

Is attention a causal agent or an emergent

property?
From the way I have been talking about “attention”, it might sound as
if it is a “thing” or a causal agent that “does something”. This is the
problem of the homunculus to which I have already referred. Of
course, it might well be that “attention” is an emergent property, that
is, it appears to be there, but plays no causal role in information pro-
cessing. William James (1890) pointed out this distinction when he
queried: “Is attention a resultant or a force?” Johnston and Dark (1986)
looked at theories of selective attention and divided them into cause
theories and effect theories. Cause theories differentiate between two
type of processing, which Johnson and Dark call Domain A and
Domain B. Domain A is high capacity, unconscious and passive and
equates with what various theorists call automatic or pre-attentive
processing. Domain B is the small-capacity, conscious, active pro-
cessing system and equates with controlled or attentive processing.
In cause theories, Domain B is “among other things an attentional
mechanism or director, or cause of selective processing” (p. 66). They
go on to point out that this kind of explanation “betrays a serious
metatheoretical problem”, as, “if a psychological construct is to
explain the intelligent and adaptive selection powers of the organism,
then it cannot itself be imbued with these powers” (p. 68). We shall
meet many examples of cause theories as we move through the
chapters, for example: Broadbent (1958, 1971), Kahneman (1973),
Posner and Snyder (1975), Shiffrin and Schneider (1977), Norman and
Shallice (1986). However, as I said, it might just be the case that atten-
tion is an “effect” that emerges from the working of the whole system
as inputs interact with schemata in long-term memory, an example of
this view is Neisser (1976). Johnson and Dark think that it would be
1. INTRODUCTION 9
 “instructive to see how much we can understand about selective
attention without appealing to a processing homunculus” (p. 70). As
has already been argued, attention seems so difficult to define, that it
is intuitively likely that these different forms of “attention” arise from
different effects rather that reflecting different causal agents.

Preview of the book

There is a familiar joke about asking someone the way to a destination
and getting the reply, “Oh, if you want to go there, you don’t want to
start from here!” The trouble is, you can’t change where you start
from. If we were to begin to research attention today with all the
knowledge that has accumulated along the way, then we might ask
questions that are rather different from those initially posed. Allport
(1993) has eloquently put all these points before.
Today, cognitive psychology is part of a joint venture, often called
cognitive science, that aims to understand how the brain enables us
to attend effectively. Together with evidence from biological and
neuropsychological studies, computational modelling, physiological
studies and brain imaging there has been considerable progress in
understanding attention. When attention research began in the 1950s,
cognitive psychology did not even have a name. Since this initial work
on attention, research has taken a long and winding road, sometimes
going down a cul de sac, sometimes finding a turning that was
missed. Posner (1993) divides work on attention into three phases.
Initially, in the 1950s and 1960s, research centred on human perform-
ance and on the concept of “the human as a single channel processor”.
In the 1970s and early 1980s the field of study had become “cognition”
and research was mostly concerned with looking for and studying
internal representations, automatic and controlled processes and
strategies for focusing and dividing attention. By the mid-1980s
“cognitive neuroscience” was the name of the game and psychologists
were taking account of biology, neuropsychological patients and
computing. Posner points out that although there has been a shift of
major emphasis, all the strands of research continue, and are repre-
sented in the 1990s. Looking forward to the future, Posner proposed
that advances in understanding the underlying neuroanatomy and
the use of computer simulations in neural networks will accelerate
our understanding of attention if used in conjunction with experi-
mental studies. Allport (1993) suggested that the uses of the term
attention are too many to be useful, but Posner (1993) believed that
if we think of attention as a system of several brain networks, the

10 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATTENTION

concept is valid. The development of sophisticated techniques such as
PET and FMRI now allow researchers to observe brain activity during
cognitive tasks that involve varieties of attention. Posner (2004a,
2004b) reviews the achievement of brain imaging in aiding our under-
standing of the link between psychology and neuroscience. He points
out that many of the experiments conducted today would have been
unthinkable 15 years ago, because the techniques were not available.
Information about the different brain areas involved in different tasks
is increasing on an almost daily basis and the challenge is to interpret
and understand the implications of these data for theories of attention.
One of the central themes to emerge is that attention is involved in
resolving conflict at a neuronal level both within local brain areas and
among more distant brain areas, e.g. Desimone and Duncan (1995).
The brain has numerous networks that feed information back and
forth in the brain and because modern neuroimaging methods allow
researchers to observe the brain in action, it is becoming possible to
see how these networks are activated in different “attentional” tasks.
It is evident that different tasks recruit different brain areas and dif-
ferent networks. There is not room in a book such as this to cover
the neuroanatomical evidence on attention, but we must be aware
that all attentional behaviour emerges from a very complex system –
the brain.

Structure of the book

We have seen that attention is a complex area of research and that the
term “attention” is applied to and implicated in a variety of rather
disparate situations and whether there are many or just a few kinds of
“attention”, there is certainly not this one. It is difficult to know how
to make this complex field of study digestible. I have chosen to follow
the development of ideas. So, to a large extent the chapters follow
the chronology of research on attention because the design of new
experiments is usually driven by the outcome of previous ones. If
different experiments had been done first, different questions might
have been asked later and the whole picture taken on a different
complexion.
We start, in Chapter 2, with some of the initial studies of auditory
and visual attention and models, proposed by Broadbent (1958),
Treisman (1960), Deutsch and Deutsch (1963). These models and
others shaped the argument on the “early–late” debate, which came
to dominate psychology for many years. Generally these models
assumed a single, limited capacity, general purpose processing

1. INTRODUCTION 11
 channel, which was the “bottleneck” in processing. Prior to the bottle-
neck, processing was parallel and did not require attention, but after
the bottleneck, processing was serial and required attention. Theorists
argued about where in the processing continuum the bottleneck was
located.
The following four chapters are all concerned with selection,
mainly from visual displays. In Chapter 3, issues centre on the nature
of visual attention and how it is controlled and directed. We consider
the evidence for a spotlight of visual attention and work by Posner
and others on attentional cueing effects. The importance of neuro-
psychological studies is demonstrated by considering how visual
neglect can help us to understand both normal attentional orienting
and attentional deficits. We also examine experiments aimed at dis-
covering how visual attention moves and if it is more like a zoom lens
than a spatial spotlight. A major question asks whether attention is
directed to spatial locations or to objects that occupy those locations.
We find that object-based attention is important, which leads us to
ask how objects are constructed from their independently coded
components.
In Chapter 4, we consider search and selective report from visual
displays. We shall review evidence that the brain codes different
attributes of the stimulus, such as identity, colour and location in
parallel and address the question of how these different codes are
accurately combined. Here, Treisman’s feature integration theory is
introduced and again the question of whether visual attention is
spatially based or object based continues. Evidence for and against
Treisman’s view is evaluated and alternate theories and computa-
tional models are introduced such as Duncan and Humphreys’ (1989)
attention engagement theory.
Chapter 5 introduces recent work on auditory attention and then
moves on to consider how information arriving from different senses
has been shown to work together or interact in studies involving
crossmodal attention. This is a relatively new and exciting area of
research on attention and demonstrates an increasing appreciation
of how attention involves multiple components across different brain
areas. Also in this chapter we discuss the role of attention in pain.
Moving on from selectivity, Chapter 6 addresses the question of
how attention is divided when tasks are combined. Resource theory is
evaluated and the importance of stimulus response compatibility
between tasks is illustrated. Although in many cases tasks can be
combined provided the input/output relations do not demand con-
current use of the same subsystem, we shall see that recent work

12 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATTENTION

suggests that there remains a fundamental limit at the final stage of
processing, when responses are selected. Attentional blink and change
blindness are related to the division or diversion of attention and
recent experiments in these areas are discussed.
Chapter 7 continues the task combination theme, with a discussion
of experiments about automaticity, skill and expertise. Here auto-
matic and controlled processing is explained in terms of Shiffrin and
Schneider’s (1977) two-process theory. However, Neuman’s (1984)
critique, reveals that the distinction between automatic and controlled
processing is at best blurred. We attempt to explain how expertise and
skill emerge with practice. By the end of these chapters it will be clear
that a very large amount of information processing is carried out
automatically, outside conscious control. Not only does this raise
the problem of how to distinguish between tasks that do or do not
need “attention” for their performance, but also raises the question
that if there is a distinction, how is “attentional” or “conscious”
control implemented?
This is the question we turn to next, when theories of selection and
control of action are debated in Chapter 8. Much of the evidence
presented in this chapter is taken from visual selection experiments,
but the central question we shall be concerned with now is “What
is attention for?” Seminal ideas put forward by Allport (1987) and
Neuman (1987) are used to illustrate the role played by selective
attention in guiding actions. Then, starting with an examination of the
breakdown of normal intention behaviour exhibited by patients with
frontal lobe damage, we try and explain both normal and abnormal
behaviour in terms of Duncan’s (1986) theory of goal directed
behaviour and Norman and Shallice’s (1986) model of willed and
automatic behaviour. The intentional control of attention and the
ability to switch between tasks is now widely studied experimentally
on normal subjects. We shall discuss early work by Allport, Styles, and
Hseih (1994) and Rogers and Monsell (1995) and evaluate the current
state of theory.
Finally, our discussion of conscious control leads on, in Chapter 9,
to a consideration of what is meant by the term “consciousness”, what
processing can proceed without it and how it might be defined. We
shall look at a variety of arguments about the nature and purpose of
consciousness. Each chapter includes, where appropriate, data from
neuropsychological patients, something on the neurophysiology of
the brain and computational models of attentional behaviour.

1. INTRODUCTION 13
 Summary
Attention is not a unitary concept. The word is used to describe and
sometimes, which is more of a worry, explain, a variety of psycho-
logical data. Although we all have some subjective idea of what we
mean when we say we are “attending”, what this means is different in
different situations. As research has progressed, old theories have
been modified or abandoned, but as science is driven by testing
theories, the path followed by the psychology of attention has been
strongly influenced by the initial assumptions. Today, account is taken
of biological, neuropsychological, computational and functional
considerations of attentional behaviour that will, we hope, bring us
closer to finding an answer to the question “What is attention?”

Further reading
• Allport, D. A. (1993). Attention and control: Have we been asking
the wrong questions? A critical review of 25 years. In D. E. Meyer,
& S. Kornblum (Eds.). Attention and performance, XIV: A silver jubilee.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
This chapter, as its title suggests, reviews the direction of
research on attention and is very critical of the assumptions that
have driven research for so long. It is, however, quite a difficult
work, incorporating a lot of neurophysiology and neuro-
psychology, which we shall meet later in this book.
• Posner, M. I. (1993). Attention before and during the decade of the
brain. In D. E. Meyer, & S. Kornblum (Eds.). Attention and per-
formance, XIV: A silver jubilee. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Inc.
This chapter is really an overview of the chapters on attention
contained within the book, but provides a brief history of the
development of attentional research. The series of books called
Attention and performance began in 1967 and have been published
every two years ever since. They contain within them the history
and evolution of work on attention by major contributors of the
time.
• Richards, G. (1996). Putting psychology in its place. London:
Routledge.
For those interested in the history of psychology, this book
provides a clear overview.

14 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATTENTION

 The rise of attention
research: A
cognitive approach 2
Beginnings
During the Second World War it had become clear that people were
severely limited in their ability to act on multiple signals arriving on
different channels. Pilots had to try to monitor several sources of
concurrent information, which might include the numerous visual
displays inside the cockpit, the visual environment outside the plane
and auditory messages coming in over the radio. Ground staff
confronted difficulties when guiding air traffic into busy aerodromes
and radar operators suffered from problems in maintaining vigilance.
Psychology had little to say about these problems at the time, but
researchers were motivated to try and discover more about the limita-
tions of human performance.
Welford (1952) carried out an experiment that showed that when
two signals are presented in rapid succession and the subject must
make a speeded response to both, reaction time to the second stimulus
depends on the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the presen-
tation of the first and second stimulus. When the second stimulus is
presented after only a very short SOA, reaction time to the second
stimulus is slower than when there is a long SOA between stimuli.
Welford called this delay in response to a second stimulus in the short
SOA condition the “psychological refractory period” (PRP). Welford
was able to show that for every millisecond decrease in SOA there was
a corresponding increase in reaction time to the second stimulus.
Welford argued that this phenomenon was evidence of a “bottle-
neck”, where the processing of the first stimulus must be completed
before processing of the next stimulus can begin. At long SOAs, the
first stimulus will have had time for its processing to be completed
before the arrival of the second stimulus and so no refractoriness will

2. THE RISE OF ATTENTION RESEARCH 15