ABSTRACT
The several theories which have been offered to explain the limits on our ability to handle information have essentially been concerned with the generation of responses to one or more incoming messages. Competition is between messages received in parallel. Thus Broadbent (1958) originally postulated selection by a filter which occurred fairly peripherally; Treisman (1966) placed selection somewhere along the input pathways but before the recognition system; and Deutsch and Deutsch (1963) in the recognition system itself but prior to conscious perception.
