The Psychology of Attention (Bradford Book) Book

"The scholarship which pervades this text is magnificent. More than any source that I know of, it provides a well-integrated view of the many approaches taken to assess the classic early-selection/late-selection debate." --Joel S. Warm, University of Cincinnati

In the past two decades, attention has been one of the most investigated areas of research in perception and cognition. The Psychology of Attention presents a systematic review of the main lines of research on attention; the topics range from perception of threshold stimuli to memory storage and decisionmaking. The book develops empirical generalizations about the major issues and suggests possible underlying theoretical principles.

Harold E. Pashler argues that widely assumed notions of processing resources and automaticity are of limited value in understanding human information processing. He proposes a central bottleneck for decisionmaking and memory retrieval, and describes evidence that distinguishes this limitation from perceptual limitations and limited-capacity short-term memory.