Attentional control: brief and prolonged

The attention system can be viewed as a collection of modules each of which contains two components: the expression of attention and the controlling operations that produce that expression. Current theories place sites of attentional control in the anterior cortex and sites of expression in the posterior cortex. Attention to a particular location or appearance of an object is itself controlled by instruction from a supervisory system, by the pointing of an arrow cue, and by bottom-up abrupt onsets of stimuli. The control of attention is regulated by cognitive activities such a cognitive load, error monitoring, and current goals. A new development of the triangular circuit theory, together with supporting data, suggest the existence of two modes of activity in columns of attentional expression: brief enhancement of pulse processing that selects information, and prolonged fast oscillations that sustain attention during preparatory and maintenance attention. It is proposed that the direct pathway of the triangular circuit controls the selection of information in the brief attention mode while the indirect pathway through the thalamus controls the production of fast oscillations in the prolonged attention mode. In the middle of the 20th century the information revolution in engineering laid the groundwork for the rapid development of the computer. As psychologists watched from the side lines they saw computers successfully perceive, remember and make decisions. These activities had been considered to be exclusively within the scientific domain of the psychologist, and many psychologists, worried that computer science could take over their field, looked carefully at the design of the computer. How did the design of the computer differ from the design of the stimulus-response scheme of behavioristic psychology, which, especially in America, had been guiding research on rats and humans for many years? What many psychologists saw in the computer design were two major components that had been discarded from main-line psychology following the behaviorist revolution: the two components were representation and voluntary control, which at the beginning of the 20th century corresponded to ideas and volition (the inner act of will) in pre-behavioristic psychology. In the 1950s and 1960s, these and other computerbased ideas influenced the development of a new field within psychology called cognitive psychology. In particular the idea of controlled processing became especially useful when it was contrasted with the concept of automatic processing (e.g., Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). Today, we tend to classify much of cognitive processing as being either controlled or automatic. For example, attentional processing is often regarded as controlled, while the processes performed without attention, such as preattentive and well-learned cognitive processes, are regarded as automatic. In recent years, however, problems have developed with the neat classification scheme of controlled vs automatic, particularly in the interpretation of attention experiments. We now hear the terms Aautomatic attention@ and Areflexive attention@, and we hear of automatic processes that are Asculpted@ by cognitive control (Monsell & Driver, 2000). The boundary that for many years sharply divided controlled processes from automatic processes has become blurred.