The Control of Visual Attention

Abstract

Abstract But [attention’ s] towering growth would appear to have been achieved at the price of calling down upon its builders the curse of Babel, “to confound their language that they may not understand one another’ s speech.” For the word “attention” quickly came to be associated ... with a diversity of meanings that have the appearance of being more chaotic even than those of the term “intelligence.” (Spearman, 1937, p. 133) Attention is a foundational concept in cognitive psychology. Many re searchers have credited it with a central role in the “cognitive revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., Broadbent, 1958; Egeth, 1992; Neisser, 1967). It is, however, a concept with a stormy history, as the above quotation indicates, and there was little agreement until recently about how it should be defined. Spearman (1937) chronicled many pro posed definitions including clearness, vivacity or intensity of percepts or concepts, an attitude of mind, a definite process or special stage in a process, the relative proportion of activated traces to all memory traces, some form of energy or desire involving will or effort, and the sensation of exertion of will. Since 1937, definitions or metaphors such as a filter (Broadbent, 1958), a skill (Neisser, 1976), a selective attenuator (Treisman, 1964), a resource (Kahneman, 1973), a “spotlight beam” within which processing is enhanced (Posner, 1980), a “zoom lens” (Eriksen & Yeh, 1985), a “glue” that binds features together (Treisman & Gelade, 1980), and a decoupler of modules from public communication channels (Navon, 1989), among others, have added to the confusion. Moreover, a number of different aspects of attention (e.g., capacity, selectivity, control, relation to consciousness, relation to arousal) have been engaged by specific paradigms and emphasized by particular writers (e.g., Solso, 1991). Recently, however, some definite progress has been made in understanding how attention to locations and/orobjects in visual space is controlled. This research has been carried out within several closely related experimental paradigms including those that allow conclusions to be made about physiological mechanisms.