ABSTRACT
Attention, like many concepts in psychology, has had a complex of meanings during its history. At the turn of the century the concept was closely related to subjective awareness of the world around us (James, 1890). With the advent of behaviorism, the study of subjective experience was discouraged and studies of attention declined. When attention was reintroduced with the development of information-processing psychology (Broadbent, 1958), studies emphasized the interference between overlapping signal processing and the limited ability to time share between tasks. Although interference between signals remains an important method for indicating attention demands, the idea of a necessary limitedcapacity bottleneck became less appealing as psychological theories developed more enthusiasm for massively parallel processing (Allport, 1989). Instead, emphasis has been placed on the necessity to coordinate information in order to limit incompatible responses (Allport, 1989) and reduce cross talk in relaying messages between separate modules (Schneider, 1985).
