Mechanisms of Attention.

Publisher Summary The concept of attention lies at the very core of cognitive psychology. Some people consider this concept to be the primary feature distinguishing the cognitive school from classical behavior theory. According to some classic theories of learning, any conditionable stimulus that reliably precedes a conditionable response by a short amount of time will come to elicit that response. Such theories regard people and animals as passive receivers and transformers of information from the environment. This chapter presents an analysis on the concept of attention, the two kinds of processing limitations of brain, and the illustrative difficulties for single-channel theory. The central assumption in single-channel theory is a processing limitation in translating information in the sensory buffer to long-term memory. The information in long-term memory may be the name of the stimulus, the meaning of the stimulus, or some other information, such as the response to be made to the stimulus. The general question that emerges is whether more than one signal has simultaneous and unimpaired access to signal-related information stored in memory. The chapter also discusses processing multiple signals and the problem of stimulus integrality.