ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the historical and theoretical foundations of each of the some diametrically opposed characterizations of attention support for information processing, as their origins date to well before attention research became popular. The concept of attention is often invoked to explain an inability to do more than one thing at a time. Such a statement represents an intuitive description of the more formal psychological construct of single-channel theory, or single-channel behavior, an extremely constraining view of the capabilities of attention. The chapter describes the concept of automaticity, examining in particular its status at the opposite end of the capabilities spectrum of human attention from the most severe bottlenecks of single-channel theory. Researchers have also demonstrated consistency-based automaticity with tasks using nonverbal stimuli, like the time-space trajectories of aircraft viewed by an air-traffic controller. Certainly trainers of various complex skills are interested in how to bring about automaticity in these skills, or their components, most effectively.
