Cognitive Connie
What is attention?
Attention is the cognitive process that selects some information for further processing while suppressing the rest. It is not a single mechanism but a family of related capacities — selective attention (choosing what to focus on), sustained attention (maintaining focus over time), and divided attention (allocating resources across tasks simultaneously).
Key concepts
Selective attention
The capacity to focus cognitive resources on one source of information while ignoring competing distractors. The cocktail party effect — being able to follow one conversation in a noisy room — demonstrates selective attention to speech. Cherry's (1953) dichotic listening experiments first systematically studied it, showing that unattended messages are processed for physical features (voice, pitch) but rarely for meaning.
Inattentional blindness
Failure to notice an unexpected, fully visible stimulus when attention is engaged elsewhere. Simons and Chabris (1999) famously showed that ~50% of participants counting basketball passes failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the game. Demonstrates that perception is not automatic — awareness of visible objects depends on attentional resources being available.
Top-down vs bottom-up attention
Top-down attention is voluntarily directed by goals, expectations, and task demands — what you are looking for. Bottom-up attention is involuntarily captured by salient, unexpected, or biologically significant stimuli — a sudden loud noise or a flash of light. The two systems interact: top-down attention can suppress bottom-up capture, and bottom-up capture can disrupt ongoing top-down focus.
Attentional blink
A ~500 ms window following the successful detection of one target in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream, during which a second target is frequently missed. The deficit reflects competition for limited attentional consolidation resources rather than a sensory processing failure. First reported by Raymond, Shapiro, and Arnell (1992).
Test your knowledge
Sources
Last reviewed July 2025- 1.
Broadbent, D. E. (1958). Perception and Communication. Pergamon Press.
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Foundational filter model of selective attention based on dichotic listening experiments — the first information-processing model of attention.
- 2.
Treisman, A. M. (1969). Strategies and models of selective attention. Psychological Review, 76(3), 282–299. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0027242
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Attenuation model challenging Broadbent's all-or-none filter with evidence that unattended channels receive partial processing.
- 3.
Posner, M. I., & Petersen, S. E. (1990). The attention system of the human brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 13, 25–42. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ne.13.030190.000325
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Influential neuroanatomical account identifying separate orienting, alerting, and executive attention networks in the human brain.
- 4.
Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9), 1059–1074. https://doi.org/10.1068/p281059
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Classic invisible gorilla study demonstrating inattentional blindness — failure to notice visible stimuli when attention is occupied.