Visual selective attention: Introductory remarks

Theories of selective attention are often put forward as having, in intent, equivalent application to audition, to vision, and, for that matter, to information processing in all other sensory modalities. However, there are certain fundamental differences in the character of information processing in vision and audition; the wiser, or at least the more cautious strategy, may be to concentrate, first of all, on developing models of the selective processes within the different senses individually. Only then, when our understanding of selection within these functionally very different modalities is more secure, will it perhaps be fruitful to look for generalizations about the selection mechanisms across different sensory systems. Accordingly, this special issue is devoted exclusively to studies on selective attention in vision. The early ideas on selective attention, within the information-processing framework, were shaped principally by work on auditory selection, in particular by the demands of selection among concurrent speech signals. In part, this was due to the human engineering context in which modern research on attention evolved. However, there was also a widespread belief that hearing is, because of its functional properties, especially suited to the study of attentional selection. This was, for example, the main message in the introductory chapter of Broadbent's (1958) influential monograph, the argument being that auditory selection is almost completely central, whereas peripheral sensory adjustments play a large part in visual selection. In the decades during which modern attention research took shape, theories of attention were thus essentially theories of auditory attention. When attention research began to be extended to the visual modality, many of the central ideas and theoretical alternatives had already been formulated, and theorizing continued to be influenced by them. Meanwhile as witnessed by the contributions to this special issue visual attention has come of age as a research field; it may be timely to consider its particular functional basis. One first step towards adequate theorizing about visual attention is to consider in which respects visual information processing is different from auditory information processing. The properties of vision that are potentially relevant to our understanding of visual attention, and that we