ABSTRACT
Our ability as human beings to selectively focus our attention on specific features of our environment is undoubtedly of fundamental importance in allowing us to adapt to an ever more complex and richer world. Take a common experience, such as standing on the concourse of a major railway station or airport, and imagine all the sights and sounds bombarding your senses and demanding recognition. Were you not able to screen out some of this abundance of stimuli, then such an experience would be daunting indeed. The study of these key mental processes has become the concern of a major strand of modern psychology, the study of cognition. This area of psychology has been a major part of the discipline for over 40 years and, from the outset, the study of attention has been an important element, for example with the publication of a highly influential work by Broadbent in 1958. Since that time, psychologists have sought to take real-world problems,
such as how we deal with several sounds simultaneously, and study them in the laboratory under carefully controlled conditions.
