This collection of essays, intended as a text for students, examines the different facets of research into attention. The book is divided into two sections: one deals with psychological research into such areas as visual search, dual-task interference and attentional bottleneck; the other deals with approaches to neural-network modelling and the effects of brain damage on attention.

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In the past two decades, attention has been one of the most investigated areas of research in perception and cognition. However, the literature on the field contains a bewildering array of findings, and empirical progress has not been matched by consensus on major theoretical issues. "The Psychology of Attention" presents a systematic review of the main lines of research on attention; the topics range from perception of threshold stimuli to memory storage and decision making. The book develops empirical generalizations about the major issues and suggests possible underlying theoretical principles.

Pashler argues that widely assumed notions of processing resources and automaticity are of limited value in understanding human information processing. He proposes a central bottleneck for decision making and memory retrieval, and describes evidence that distinguishes this limitation from perceptual limitations and limited-capacity short-term memory.

This collection of essays, intended as a text for students, examines the different facets of research into attention. The book is divided into two sections: one deals with psychological research into such areas as visual search, dual-task interference and attentional bottleneck; the other deals with approaches to neural-network modelling and the effects of brain damage on attention.