ABSTRACT
In the human psychology laboratory, attention is commonly treated as a rational, conscious, cognitive activity. The focus of attention is often defined by instructions, or alternatively, by varying “expectancies” for innocuous stimuli (pure tones, words and syllables, geometric objects) to create “oddballs.” Although this approach has clearly illuminated many aspects of selective information processing, it neglects a primary feature of what might be called natural selective attention: In the competitive world of species survival, attention is determined primarily by motivation.
