ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an issue of wide and enduring interest in the field of psychology; that attentive processing of relevant information may be achieved by mechanisms that impede the processing of irrelevant information. It points out that linking specific behavioral effects with inhibitory attentional mechanisms is an inherently complex task. In particular, juxtaposition of the terms 'attention' and 'inhibition' invites speculation about the relation between higher-order mental constructs and their physiological determinants. At the same time, introspection about attention may well reflect a description of the end product of attentive analysis, rather than a mechanistic explanation of how that end product came to be. When attention is used to generate an expectation for a stimulus of a particular category, responses to stimuli from an unexpected category are often less efficient. An alternative to the limited central resource interpretation of dual-task deficits assumes that an attentional bottleneck is created by a stage of processing that is inherently serial in nature.
