ABSTRACT
At the very beginning of this book, I said that I did not have a simple definition of attention and tried to illustrate the wide variety of situations to which the term “attention” is applied in everyday usage. However, despite this lack of clarity, we set off on our journey through experiments which were said to be about “attention”, hoping that as we went along we would discover, if not what “attention” is, at least some of its varieties. We journeyed through selective attention, the movement and allocation of attention, attention to objects, selection for action, divided attention, skill, automaticity, and control, etc. Along the way we met theories designed, successfully or otherwise, to account for all of these “attentional” tasks. Finally, we arrived at the end of the book to find ourselves engaged in a debate on the nature and function of consciousness, for which there is also no agreed definition. How did this happen?
