Attention is the cognitive process Cognition is the scientific term for "the process of thought". Usage of the term varies in different disciplines; for example in psychology and cognitive science, it usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions. Other interpretations of the meaning of cognition link it to the development of of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. Attention has also been referred to as the allocation of processing resources.^[1]

Examples include listening carefully to what someone is saying while ignoring other conversations in a room (the cocktail party effect The cocktail party effect describes the ability to focus one's listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations. This effect enables us to talk in a noisy place. For example, when we are talking with our friend in a crowded party, we still can listen and understand what our) or listening to a cell phone conversation while driving a car.^[2] Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology Psychology is the study of human or animal mental functions and behaviors. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is a psychologist. Psychologists are classified as social or behavioral scientists. Psychological research can be considered either basic or applied. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in and cognitive neuroscience Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both psychology and.

William James William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a medical doctor. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James, in his textbook Principles of Psychology The Principles of Psychology is a monumental text in the history of psychology, written by William James and published in 1890, remarked:

Attention remains a major area of investigation within education Education in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another, psychology Psychology is the study of human or animal mental functions and behaviors. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is a psychologist. Psychologists are classified as social or behavioral scientists. Psychological research can be considered either basic or applied. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in and neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. Nevertheless, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that involves other disciplines such as psychology, computer science, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and medicine. As a result, the scope of neuroscience has. Areas of active investigation involve determining the source of the signals that generate attention, the effects of these signals on the tuning Neuronal tuning refers to the property of brain cells to selectively represent a particular kind of sensory, motor, or cognitive information. For example, an auditory system neuron best responding to the sound of particular frequency is said to be tuned to that frequency. In the visual system, there are neurons tuned to particular objects, for properties of sensory neurons A neuron (pronounced /ˈnjʊərɒn/ NOOR-on, also known as a neurone or nerve cell) is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electrical and chemical signaling. Chemical signaling occurs via synapses, specialized connections with other cells. Neurons connect to each other to form networks. Neurons are the core, and the relationship between attention and other cognitive processes like working memory Working memory is the executive and attentional aspect of short-term memory involved in the interim integration, processing, disposal, and retrieval of information. Working memory tasks include the active monitoring or manipulation of information or behaviors. It is a theoretical construct within cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Theories and vigilance. A relatively new body of research is investigating the phenomenon of traumatic brain injuries Traumatic brain injury occurs when an outside force traumatically injures the brain. TBI can be classified based on severity, mechanism (closed or penetrating head injury), or other features (e.g. occurring in a specific location or over a widespread area). Head injury usually refers to TBI, but is a broader category because it can involve damage and their effects on attention. Ren.

History of the study of attention

1850s to 1900s

In James' time, the method more commonly used to study attention was introspection Introspection is the self-observation and reporting of conscious inner thoughts, desires and sensations. It is a conscious mental and usually purposive process relying on thinking, reasoning, and examining one's own thoughts, feelings, and, in more spiritual cases, one's soul. It can also be called contemplation of one's self, and is contrasted. However, as early as 1858, Franciscus Donders used mental chronometry Mental chronometry is the use of response time in perceptual-motor tasks to infer the content, duration, and temporal sequencing of cognitive operations. Mental chronometry is one of the core paradigms of experimental and cognitive psychology, and has found application in various disciplines including cognitive psychophysiology/cognitive to study attention and it was considered a major field of intellectual inquiry by such diverse authors as Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic method of psychiatry. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for treating psychopathology. One major debate in this period was whether it was possible to attend to two things at once (split attention). Walter Benjamin described this experience as "reception in a state of distraction." This disagreement could only be resolved through experimentation.

1950s to present

In the 1950s, research psychologists There are many different types of psychologists, as is reflected by the 56 different divisions of the American Psychological Association . Psychologists are generally described as being either "applied" or "research-oriented". The common terms used to describe this central division in psychology are "scientists" or & renewed their interest in attention when the dominant epistemology shifted from positivism (i.e., behaviorism) to realism Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief in a reality that is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Philosophers who profess realism also typically believe that truth consists in a belief's correspondence to reality. We may speak of realism with respect to other minds, the past, during what has come to be known as the "cognitive revolution The cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences. It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research. The relevant areas of interchange were the combination of psychology, anthropology and linguistics with approaches".^[4] The cognitive revolution admitted unobservable cognitive processes like attention as legitimate objects of scientific study.

Modern research on attention began with the analysis of the "cocktail party problem" by Colin Cherry in 1953. At a cocktail party how do people select the conversation that they are listening to and ignore the rest? This problem is at times called "focused attention", as opposed to "divided attention". Cherry performed a number of experiments which became known as dichotic listening and were extended by Donald Broadbent Donald Eric Broadbent was an influential English experimental psychologist. 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 and others. ^[5] In a typical experiment, subjects would use a set of headphones Headphones are a pair of small loudspeakers, or less commonly a single speaker, with a way of holding them close to a user's ears and a means of connecting them to a signal source such as an audio amplifier, radio or CD player. They are also known as stereophones, headsets or, colloquially cans. The in-ear versions are known as earphones or to listen to two streams of words in different ears The ear is the organ that detects sound. It not only acts as a receiver for sound, but also plays a major role in the sense of balance and body position. The ear is part of the auditory system and selectively attend to one stream. After the task, the experimenter would question the subjects about the content of the unattended stream. Experiments by Gray and Wedderburn and later Anne Treisman Anne Marie Treisman FRS is a psychologist currently at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. She researches visual attention, object perception, and memory. One of her most influential works is the feature integration theory of attention, first published with G. Gelade in 1980. Treisman is married to Nobel Laureate psychologist Daniel pointed out various problems in Broadbent's early model and eventually led to the Deutsch-Norman model in 1968. In this model, no signal is filtered out, but all are processed to the point of activating their stored representations in memory. The point at which attention becomes "selective" is when one of the memory representations is selected for further processing. At any time, only one can be selected, resulting in the attentional bottleneck.^[6]

This debate became known as the early-selection vs late-selection models. In the early selection models (first proposed by Donald Broadbent Donald Eric Broadbent was an influential English experimental psychologist. 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 and Anne Treisman Anne Marie Treisman FRS is a psychologist currently at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. She researches visual attention, object perception, and memory. One of her most influential works is the feature integration theory of attention, first published with G. Gelade in 1980. Treisman is married to Nobel Laureate psychologist Daniel), attention shuts down or attenuates processing in the unattended ear before the mind can analyze its semantic content. In the late selection models (first proposed by J. Anthony Deutsch and Diana Deutsch), the content in both ears is analyzed semantically, but the words in the unattended ear cannot access consciousness.^[7] This debate has still not been resolved.

Anne Treisman Anne Marie Treisman FRS is a psychologist currently at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. She researches visual attention, object perception, and memory. One of her most influential works is the feature integration theory of attention, first published with G. Gelade in 1980. Treisman is married to Nobel Laureate psychologist Daniel developed the highly influential feature integration theory The feature integration theory, developed by Anne Treisman, a professor at Princeton University's Department of Psychology, and Gelade since the early 1980s, posits that different kinds of attention are responsible for binding different features into consciously experienced wholes. The theory has been one of the most influential psychological.^[8] According to this model, attention binds different features of an object (e.g., color and shape) into consciously experienced wholes. Although this model has received much criticism, it is still widely accepted or held up with modifications as in Jeremy Wolfe's Guided Search Theory.^[9]

In the 1960s, Robert Wurtz at the National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. It consists of 27 separate institutes and centers which includes the Office of the Director. Francis S. Collins is the current began recording electrical signals from the brains of macaques The macaques constitute a genus (Macaca, /məˈkäkə/) of Old World monkeys of the subfamily Cercopithecinae who were trained to perform attentional tasks. These experiments showed for the first time that there was a direct neural correlate of a mental process (namely, enhanced firing in the superior colliculus The optic tectum or simply tectum is a paired structure that forms a major component of the vertebrate midbrain. In mammals this structure is more commonly called the superior colliculus , but even in mammals, the adjective tectal is commonly used. The tectum is a layered structure, with a number of layers that varies by species. The superficial).^{[citation needed][not specific enough to verify]}

In the 1990s, psychologists began using PET Positron emission tomography is a nuclear medicine imaging technique which produces a three-dimensional image or picture of functional processes in the body. The system detects pairs of gamma rays emitted indirectly by a positron-emitting radionuclide (tracer), which is introduced into the body on a biologically active molecule. Images of tracer and later fMRI Functional MRI or functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a type of specialized MRI scan. It measures the hemodynamic response (change in blood flow) related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging. Since the early 1990s, fMRI has come to dominate to image the brain in attentive tasks. Because of the highly expensive equipment that was generally only available in hospitals, psychologists sought for cooperation with neurologists. Pioneers of brain imaging studies of selective attention are psychologist Michael I. Posner Michael I. Posner is the editor of numerous cognitive and neuroscience compilations and is an eminent researcher in the field of attention. He is currently an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Oregon (Department of Psychology, Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences) and an adjunct professor at the Weill Medical College in (then already renown for his seminal work on visual selective attention) and neurologist Marcus Raichle.^{[citation needed]} Their results soon sparked interest from the entire neuroscience community in these psychological studies, which had until then focused on monkey brains. With the development of these technological innovations neuroscientists Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. Nevertheless, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that involves other disciplines such as psychology, computer science, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and medicine. As a result, the scope of neuroscience has became interested in this type of research that combines sophisticated experimental paradigms from cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is a discipline within psychology that investigates the internal mental processes of thought such as visual processing, memory, thinking, learning, feeling, problem solving, and language with these new brain imaging techniques. Although the older technique of EEG Electroencephalography is the recording of electrical activity along the scalp produced by the firing of neurons within the brain. In clinical contexts, EEG refers to the recording of the brain's spontaneous electrical activity over a short period of time, usually 20–40 minutes, as recorded from multiple electrodes placed on the scalp. In had long been used to study the brain activity underlying selective attention by cognitive psychophysiologists Psychophysiology is the branch of psychology that is concerned with the physiological bases of psychological processes. While psychophysiology was a general broad field of research in the 1960s and 1970s, it has now become quite specialized, and has branced into subspecializations. For example, Social Psychophysiology, Cardiovascular, the ability of the newer techniques to actually measure precisely localized activity inside the brain generated renewed interest by a wider community of researchers. The results of these experiments have shown a broad agreement with the psychological, psychophysiological and the experiments performed on monkeys.^{[citation needed]}

Selective visual attention

In cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is a discipline within psychology that investigates the internal mental processes of thought such as visual processing, memory, thinking, learning, feeling, problem solving, and language there are at least two models which describe how visual attention operates. These models may be considered loosely as metaphors which are used to describe internal processes and to generate hypotheses that are falsifiable Falsifiability or refutability is the logical possibility that an assertion could be shown false by a particular observation or physical experiment. That something is "falsifiable" does not mean it is false; rather, it means that if the statement were false, then its falsehood could be demonstrated. Generally speaking, visual attention is thought to operate as a two-stage process.^[10] In the first stage, attention is distributed uniformly over the external visual scene and processing of information is performed in parallel. In the second stage, attention is concentrated to a specific area of the visual scene (i.e. it is focused), and processing is performed in a serial fashion.

The first of these models to appear in the literature is the spotlight model. The term "spotlight" was first used by David LaBerge,^[11] and was inspired by the work of William James William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a medical doctor. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James who described attention as having a focus, a margin, and a fringe.^[12] The focus is an area that extracts information from the visual scene with a high-resolution, the geometric center of which being where visual attention is directed. Surrounding the focus is the fringe of attention which extracts information in a much more crude fashion (i.e. low-resolution). This fringe extends out to a specified area and this cut-off is called the margin.

The second model is called the zoom-lens model, and was first introduced in 1983.^[13] This model inherits all properties of the spotlight model (i.e. the focus, the fringe, and the margin) but has the added property of changing in size. This size-change mechanism was inspired by the zoom lens A zoom lens is a mechanical assembly of lens elements with the ability to vary its focal length , as opposed to a fixed focal length (FFL) lens (see prime lens). They are commonly used with still, video, motion picture cameras, projectors, some binoculars, microscopes, telescopes, telescopic sights, and other optical instruments you might find on a camera, and any change in size can be described by a trade-off in the efficiency of processing.^[14] The zoom-lens of attention can be described in terms of an inverse trade-off between the size of focus and the efficiency of processing: because attentional resources are assumed to be fixed, then it follows that the larger the focus is, the slower processing will be of that region of the visual scene since this fixed resource will be distributed over a larger area. It is thought that the focus of attention can subtend a minimum of 1° of visual angle The visual angle is the angle a viewed object subtends at the eye, usually stated in degrees of arc. It also is called the object's angular size,^[12][15] however the maximum size has not yet been determined.

Overt and covert attention

Attention may be differentiated according to its status as "overt" versus "covert."^[16] Overt attention is the act of directing sense Senses are the physiological capacities within organisms that provide inputs for perception. The senses and their operation, classification, and theory are overlapping topics studied by a variety of fields, most notably neuroscience, cognitive psychology , and philosophy of perception. The nervous system has a specific sensory system or organ, organs towards a stimulus source. Covert attention is the act of mentally focusing on one of several possible sensory stimuli. Covert attention is thought to be a neural process that enhances the signal from a particular part of the sensory panorama.

There are studies that suggest the mechanisms of overt and covert attention may not be as separate as previously believed. Though humans and primates can look in one direction but attend in another, there may be an underlying neural circuitry that links shifts in covert attention to plans to shift gaze. For example, if individuals attend to the right hand corner field of view, movement of the eyes in that direction may have to be actively suppressed.

The current view is that visual covert attention is a mechanism for quickly scanning the field of view for interesting locations. This shift in covert attention is linked to eye movement circuitry that sets up a slower saccade Humans and many other animals do not look at a scene in fixed steadiness ; instead, the eyes move around, locating interesting parts of the scene and building up a mental, three-dimensional 'map' corresponding to the scene (as opposed to the graphical map of avians, that often relies upon detection of angular movement on the retina). One reason to that location.

Clinical model of attention

Attention is best described as the sustained focus of cognitive resources on information while filtering or ignoring extraneous information. Attention is a very basic function that often is a precursor to all other neurological/cognitive functions. As is frequently the case, clinical models of attention differ from investigation models. One of the most used models for the evaluation of attention in patients with very different neurologic Neurology is a medical specialty dealing with disorders of the nervous system. Specifically, it deals with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of disease involving the central, peripheral, and autonomic nervous systems, including their coverings, blood vessels, and all effector tissue, such as muscle. The corresponding surgical specialty pathologies is the model of Sohlberg and Mateer.^[17] This hierarchic model is based in the recovering of attention processes of brain damage 'Brain damage' is a term no longer used today and has been replaced in recent decades by 'brain injury' ; meaning the destruction or degeneration of brain cells, often with an implication that the loss is significant in terms of functioning or conscious experience. It is a common and very broad in scope, such that in medicine a vast range of patients after coma In medicine, a coma is a profound state of unconsciousness. A person in a coma cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to pain, light or sound, does not have sleep-wake cycles, and does not take voluntary actions. A person in a state of coma can be described as comatose. Five different kinds of activities of growing difficulty are described in the model; connecting with the activities that patients could do as their recovering process advanced.

• Focused attention: The ability to respond discretely to specific visual, auditory or tactile stimuli.
• Sustained attention (vigilance): The ability to maintain a consistent behavioral response during continuous and repetitive activity.
• Selective attention: The ability to maintain a behavioral or cognitive set in the face of distracting or competing stimuli. Therefore it incorporates the notion of "freedom from distractibility."
• Alternating attention: The ability of mental flexibility that allows individuals to shift their focus of attention and move between tasks having different cognitive requirements.
• Divided attention: This is the highest level of attention and it refers to the ability to respond simultaneously to multiple tasks or multiple task demands.

This model has been shown to be very useful in evaluating attention in very different pathologies, correlates strongly with daily difficulties and is especially helpful in designing stimulation programs such as APT (attention process training), a rehabilitation program for neurologic patients of the same authors.

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