ABSTRACT
Relationship to the study of attention in psychology changed depending on the dominant theoretical approach in psychology. For example, behaviorism, which for long period of time dominated in psychology, rejected the concept of attention as mentalist category in psychology. However, with the emergence of cognitive psychology, and especially after the work of Broadbent (1958) perception and communication interest to the problem of attention sharply increased. It should be noted that there are some difficulties associated with the study of attention. This is explained by the fact that attention encompasses a broad range of phenomena. This field of study has no clear boundaries and it often is difficult to separate attention from the consideration of other mental processes. The term attention encompasses such phenomena important for the study human work as selectiveness, concentration, switching, dividing, sustaining, etc. Due to the variety of phenomena of attention and its properties, it becomes important the selection of it’s the most important aspects in the study of human work. In this chapter, we want to demonstrate the usefulness of integrating ideas of cognitive psychology to the ideas of activity theory (AT) in the study of attention. This integration is especially evident in the study of human work. More specifically, we pay attention to application SSAT and some ideas of cognitive psychology in the study of attention. Here, cognitive approach will be combined with functional analysis when attention is described as a goal-directed self-regulative system.
