ABSTRACT
Limitation has been regarded as one of the central aspects of attention ever since the concept of attention first appeared in ancient Greek philosophy. There has been a long tradition of discussing how it is limited, starting off with Aristotle’s sophisticated consideration of the arguments for and against the assumption that the mind can attend to only one thing at a time (see Neumann, 1971). The modern research into attention that developed after the Second World War has largely centered around the question where attention is limited; i.e., whether its limitation restricts stimulus identification, or whether it affects only subsequent processes such as memory storage and decision making (for recent reviews see Allport, 1980; Broadbent, 1982; Kahneman & Treisman, 1984; Marcel, 1983; van der Heijden, this volume). By contrast, the question why attention is limited has so far attracted comparatively little interest.
