ABSTRACT
Our perceptual experiences are strongly influenced by selective attention. The richness of a typical visual environment, replete with objects of varying colors, shapes, and sizes, far exceeds the brain’s representational capacity. This limitation gives rise to competition among objects for access to capacity-limited cognitive processes such as decision making and memory storage. Attention is the mechanism by which organisms select which stimuli gain access to these cognitive processes, determining the information that is represented in our mental life (Desimone & Duncan, 1995).
