What Is Attention?
What Is Attention?
What Is Attention?
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:
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:
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.
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
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
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
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.