Attention: Theoretical and Psychological Perspectives

Abstract

This chapter reviews research on attention using behavioral and psychological methods. It attempts to illustrate what was learned through these tools alone and what is gained when tools from cognitive neuroscience are added. The psychological approaches defined many of the theoretical issues, such as the nature of the overloads that make attention necessary, the level of selection, the method of selection (enhancement of attended stimuli or suppression of unattended ones), the targets of selection (locations, objects, or attributes), the ways in which attention is controlled, and the role of attention in solving the feature-binding problem. Psychology also developed many of the paradigms used to probe the underlying mechanisms that are now being confirmed by converging evidence from brain imaging and from studies of brain-damaged patients. Theories of attention have evolved from the early sequential “pipeline” model of processing to a more flexible and interactive model with parallel streams specializing in different forms of perceptual analysis, iterative cycles of processing, and reentry to earlier levels. Attentional selection takes many forms and applies at many levels. We learn as much from exploring the constraints on flexibility—what cannot be done—as from discovering what can.