Cockpit Task Management Bibliography

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Allport, A. (1992)

TITLE: Attention and Control: Have We Been Asking the Wrong Questions? A Critical Review of Twenty-Five Years
PUBLISHER: Attention and Performance XIV: Synergies in Experimental Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Neuroscience, David E. Meyer and Sylvan Kornblum (eds.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
KEYWORDS: attention research overview, assumptions, attentional theory, late vs. early selection, limited resource
SUMMARY: A critical review of the underlying assumptions of attention research.  Lists, and criticizes most of the assumptions like, a central pool of attentional resource, attention is limited, etc.  He criticizes all the simplifying assumptions of attention research, and suggests that attentional functions are all very different kinds.

 SIGNIFICANT CONCEPTS/EXCERPTS:

There are two intertwined controversies are still widely perceived as the central, and the most fundamental, issues to be resolved. These are still unresolved. These are:

  1. The controversy over "early" versus "ate" perceptual selection, where the question at issue is whether attentional selection occurs before or after the encoding of categorical stimulus identity;
  2. The question of which cognitive processes "require attention" (and are therefore "limited"), and which processes can be performed "without attention" (or "automatically").

Lists a bunch of "assumptions of attention" on pgs., 184 - 188.

(Concluding Remarks on pg. 206).

"There is one way to escape from this dreadful penalty (the simplifying assumptions of attention).  It is by taking seriously the idea that attentional functions are of very many different kinds, serving a great range of different computational purposes.  There can be no simple theory of attention, any more than there can be a simple theory of thought.  A humbler but also a more ambitious task for the next twenty-five years will be to characterize, in cognitive neurobiological terms, as much as possible of this great diversity of attentional functions."

 

 

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