Dynamics of attentional control

Excerpt

Humans are continuously encountering a myriad of events at any given time in their environment, providing a huge load on the brain in processing the various inputs, linking (some of) them to representations stored in memory, and organizing appropriate responses (to some of them). However, while the brain has an impressive capability of parallel processing, its capacity is strongly limited. Thus, humans cannot consciously represent all the information available at any one time and they cannot initiate, at the same time, more than a few different actions. In order to overcome these limitations, humans have to focus on some limited subset of the whole perceptual array. The neuro-cognitive mechanisms that mediate this selection are referred to as ‘attention’. …