ABSTRACT
The most common form of selective looking involves some kind of visual search, and studies of saccadic eye movements reveal how we scan a scene in order to detect a target or to extract other kinds of information. The orienting response occurs when attention is drawn to a sudden change in the environment such as a noise, movement in the peripheral visual field, or a change in illumination. Structural theories of attention focus on filtering processes and the problem of early or late selection. Attentional resource theories concentrate on divided attention and the mechanisms that determine the limits on our performance of simultaneous tasks. The work on divided attention has given rise to theories that use the notion of attentional resource. The basic concept here is of a central attentional capacity that can be deployed across tasks so that two concurrent tasks can be performed successfully only if their combined demands do not exceed the available resource.
