ABSTRACT
Although the attention construct plays a critical role in scientific analysis of various forms of information processing and behavior, a good deal of these processes run their course independently of attention. This chapter examines some leading views on the nature and extent of automatic processing, and thus on the borderline between automatic and attentive processing and then discusses theories of attention. The chapter reviews resource or capacity theories of attention. In S. Schneider and colleagues' characterizations of automaticity, M. I. Posner and E. Snyder's three automaticity criteria are well represented. Schneider et al. propose some additional characterizations but most of them are either implicated or easily accommodated by Posner and Snyder's criteria. The early-selection theories allow much less automatic processing than do the late-selection theories, with the strong versions of the early-selection theories accepting no semantic processing of the unattended input at all.
