- Selective attention
- The capacity to focus cognitive resources on one source of information while giving lower priority to competing inputs. 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 showed that unattended messages are processed for physical features (voice, pitch) but rarely for meaning — a finding that shaped the first filter models of attention.
- Sustained attention and vigilance
- The ability to maintain an alert, focused state over extended periods, particularly when monitoring for infrequent or unpredictable targets. Classic vigilance research (Mackworth, 1948) using radar-monitoring tasks showed that detection performance declines within 30 minutes — the "vigilance decrement." Sustained attention draws on overlapping neural systems with selective attention but is particularly sensitive to fatigue, boredom, and arousal level.
- Inattentional blindness
- The failure to notice an unexpected, fully visible stimulus when attention is directed elsewhere. In the Simons and Chabris (1999) study, roughly half of participants who were concentrating on counting basketball passes failed to notice a person in a gorilla costume walking through the scene. The result illustrates that consciously noticing an event depends partly on where attention is directed — not simply on whether the stimulus was visible.
- Change blindness
- The failure to detect a change in a visual scene, particularly when the change occurs during an interruption such as a cut, blink, or brief disturbance. Rensink et al. (1997) showed that observers fail to notice large changes to objects in photographs when the change coincides with a brief flicker. Change blindness is related to but distinct from inattentional blindness: both involve missing something visible, but inattentional blindness concerns a new object that was always there, while change blindness concerns an object that changed.
- Top-down vs bottom-up attention
- Top-down (goal-directed) attention is voluntarily guided by goals, expectations, and task demands — what you are looking for. Bottom-up (stimulus-driven) attention is involuntarily captured by salient, sudden, or biologically significant stimuli — a flash of light or an unexpected loud sound. In most real situations, both operate simultaneously: top-down attention shapes what we search for, while bottom-up capture can redirect attention despite current goals. The dorsal attention network supports top-down attention; the ventral network mediates bottom-up capture.
- Attentional networks: alerting, orienting, executive control
- Posner and Petersen (1990) proposed three functionally distinct attentional networks. The alerting network (brainstem noradrenergic systems + frontal and parietal regions) maintains a state of readiness to respond. The orienting network (superior parietal cortex + frontal eye fields + superior colliculus) directs attention to a location or object in space. The executive control network (anterior cingulate cortex + lateral PFC) resolves conflict between competing responses and regulates attention when goals conflict with distracting stimuli. These networks interact but are dissociable by lesion and neuroimaging evidence.
- Filter models: Broadbent and Treisman
- Broadbent's (1958) filter model proposed that attention acts as an early filter based on physical features (e.g. voice pitch), allowing only one channel to be processed for meaning at a time. Treisman's (1969) attenuation model revised this: rather than fully blocking unattended channels, the filter attenuates (weakens) them, explaining how personally relevant information — your own name, a sudden threat — can still capture attention from an unattended channel. Both models shaped the information-processing approach to selective attention.
- Attentional blink
- When two targets appear close together in a rapid stream of stimuli, people are often good at detecting the first but temporarily worse at detecting the second. This ~500 ms window of reduced sensitivity, called the attentional blink, is studied using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). It is thought to reflect competition for limited processing and consolidation resources following the first target — not a failure of sensory registration but of attentional engagement. First reported by Raymond, Shapiro, and Arnell (1992).