The notion that certain mental or physical events can capture attention has been one of the most enduring topics in the study of attention owing to the importance of understanding how goal-directed and stimulus-driven processes interact in perception and cognition. Despite the clear theoretical and applied importance of attentional capture, a broad survey of this field suggests that the term "capture" means different things to different people. In some cases, it refers to covert shifts of spatial attention, in others involuntary saccades, and in still others general disruption of processing by irrelevant stimuli. The properties that elicit "capture" can also range from abruptly onset or moving lights, to discontinuities in textures, to unexpected tones, to emotionally valenced words or pictures, to directional signs and symbols. Attentional capture has been explored in both the spatial and temporal domains as well as the visual and auditory modalities. There are also a number of different theoretical perspectives on the mechanisms underlying "capture" (both functional and neurophysiological) and the level of cognitive control over capture. This special issue provides a sampling of the diversity of approaches, domains, and theoretical perspectives that currently exist in the study of attentional capture. Together, these contributions should help evaluate the degree to which attentional capture represents a unitary construct that reflects fundamental theoretical principles and mechanisms of the mind.

During the last three decades, there have been enormous advances in our understanding of the neural mechanisms of selective attention at the network as well as the cellular level. The Oxford Handbook of Attention brings together the different research areas that constitute contemporary attention research into one comprehensive and authoritative volume. In 40 chapters, it covers the most important aspects of attention research from the areas of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, human and animal neuroscience, computational modelling, and philosophy. The book is divided into 4 main sections. Following an introduction from Michael Posner, the books starts by looking at theoretical models of attention. The next two sections are dedicated to spatial attention and non-spatial attention respectively. Within section 4, the authors consider the interactions between attention and other psychological domains. The last two sections focus on attention-related disorders, and finally, on computational models of attention. Aimed at both scholars and students, the Oxford Handbook of Attention provides a concise and state-of-the-art review of the current literature in this field.

Attention: Theory and Practice provides a balance between a readable overview of attention and an emphasis on how theories and paradigms for the study of attention have developed. The book highlights the important issues and major findings while giving sufficient details of experimental studies, models, and theories so that results and conclusions are easy to follow and evaluate. Rather than brushing over tricky technical details, the authors explain them clearly, giving readers the benefit of understanding the motivation for and techniques of the experiments in order to allow readers to think through results, models, and theories for themselves. Attention is an accessible text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in psychology, as well as an important resource for researchers and practitioners interested in gaining an overview of the field of attention.

This volume explores the essential issues involved in bringing phenomenology together with the cognitive sciences, and provides some examples of research located at the intersection of these disciplines. The topics addressed here cover a lot of ground, including questions about naturalizing phenomenology, the precise methods of phenomenology and how they can be used in the empirical cognitive sciences, specific analyses of perception, attention, emotion, imagination, embodied movement, action and agency, representation and cognition, inters- jectivity, language and metaphor. In addition there are chapters that focus on empirical experiments involving psychophysics, perception, and neuro- and psychopathologies. The idea that phenomenology, understood as a philosophical approach taken by thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others, can offer a positive contribution to the cognitive sciences is a relatively recent idea. Prior to the 1990s, phenomenology was employed in a critique of the first wave of cognitivist and computational approaches to the mind (see Dreyfus 1972). What some consider a second wave in cognitive science, with emphasis on connectionism and neuros- ence, opened up possibilities for phenomenological intervention in a more positive way, resulting in proposals like neurophenomenology (Varela 1996). Thus, bra- imaging technologies can turn to phenomenological insights to guide experimen- tion (see, e. g. , Jack and Roepstorff 2003; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008).

During the last three decades, there have been enormous advances in our understanding of the neural mechanisms of selective attention at the network as well as the cellular level. The Oxford Handbook of Attention brings together the different research areas that constitute contemporary attention research into one comprehensive and authoritative volume. In 40 chapters, it covers the most important aspects of attention research from the areas of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, human and animal neuroscience, computational modelling, and philosophy. The book is divided into 4 main sections. Following an introduction from Michael Posner, the books starts by looking at theoretical models of attention. The next two sections are dedicated to spatial attention and non-spatial attention respectively. Within section 4, the authors consider the interactions between attention and other psychological domains. The last two sections focus on attention-related disorders, and finally, on computational models of attention. Aimed at both scholars and students, the Oxford Handbook of Attention provides a concise and state-of-the-art review of the current literature in this field.

Originally published in 1974, this volume examines the behavioural similarities of obese humans and animals whose so-called feeding centre (the ventro-medial hypothalamic nuclei) has been lesioned. Both the obese human and the VMH-lesioned animal seem to share a hyposensitivity to the internal (physiological) cues to eating and hypersensitivity to external cues associated with food. Beginning with a review, these obese animals and the human obese are compared point by point on experimental results reported in the literature. Then, new findings are presented that specifically tested humans for relationships that are well-established for lesioned animals. Next, a theoretical framework integrates the human and animal data to postulate that the relationship of cue prominence and probability of response is stronger for the obese than for normal. The causes for this, and the extension of the basis for the obese’s eating behaviour to other areas, are discussed in light of further experiments that will make this invaluable reading for all concerned with the history of obesity and the issues of regulatory behaviour.

Paying attention is something we are all familiar with and often take for granted, yet the nature of the operations involved in paying attention is one of the most profound mysteries of the brain. This book contains a rich, interdisciplinary collection of articles by some of the pioneers of contemporary research on attention. Central themes include how attention is moved within the visual field; attention's role during visual search, and the inhibition of these search processes; how attentional processing changes as continued practice leads to automatic performance; how visual and auditory attentional processing may be linked; and recent advances in functional neuro-imaging and how they have been used to study the brain's attentional network

In this Element, a framework is proposed in which it is assumed that visual selection is the result of the interaction between top-down, bottom-up and selection-history factors. The Element discusses top-down attentional engagement and suppression, bottom-up selection by abrupt onsets and static singletons as well as lingering biases due to selection-history entailing priming, reward and statistical learning. We present an integrated framework in which biased competition among these three factors drives attention in a winner-take-all-fashion. We speculate which brain areas are likely to be involved and how signals representing these three factors feed into the priority map which ultimately determines selection.

The Influence of Attention, Learning, and Motivation on Visual Search will bring together distinguished authors who are conducting cutting edge research on the many factors that influence search behavior. These factors will include low-level feature detection; statistical learning; scene perception; neural mechanisms of attention; and applied research in real world settings.

Originally published in 1985, this volume presents the proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Attention and Performance. With few exceptions, the central emphasis in previous meetings of the Attention and Performance Association was on the information-processing approach to normal human cognition. This emphasis had been supplemented, on occasion, by studies employing EEG methods, but there had not been systematic attempts to relate the information-processing approach to work in the neurosciences. This volume seeks to emphasize the search for mechanism with such methods of approach as the following: anatomical, physiological, neuropsychological, behavioral, and computational. The editors believed that this was in accord with recent developing trends in cognition and particularly with developments in the study of attention at the time.