Books
etcetera
The Psychology of Attention
by Harold E. Pashler, MIT Press, 1998. £38.50 (xiv + 494 pages)
ISBN 0262 16165 6
Patrick Cavanagh (1998) recently noted
that research on attention has ‘in-
creased by 400% relative to other cat-
egories of cognitive publications’ over
the past two decades1. The reason for
this increase, he suggested, was that by
using the term ‘attention’, researchers
have been able to talk about conscious
information processing without using
the ‘C’ word. However, another equally,
if not more, important reason for this
increase is that researchers studying
brain function, using techniques such
as electrophysiology, neurophysiology,
PET, and fMRI have increasing come to
acknowledge the role of attention in
many of the phenomena they study.
Parasuraman’s recent edited volume
on attention successfully captures the
flavour of these recent multidisciplinary
interactions, and manages to highlight
the progress made by the convergent
methodologies approach2. For exam-
ple, one recent approach to the early-
versus late-selection debate has been
to demonstrate precisely which brain
structures’ activity can be modulated
by attention (see Ref. 3 for an elegant
demonstration of this).
It is unfortunate then that Pashler’s
recent monograph on attention focuses
almost exclusively on behavioural stud-
ies of attention, analysed in the in-
formation-processing framework that
emerged during the 1940s. Neuro-
imaging techniques and findings are
scarcely mentioned, and neuropsycho-
logical findings from patients with at-
tentional deficits are also excluded, be-
cause Pashler claims that they ‘do not
have particularly direct implications for
cognitive architecture’ (p. xi; see Driver,
1998, for an entirely different perspec-
tive on this issue4). However, it could
be argued that it is unfair to judge a
book that never professes to be any-
thing more that a volume about the
’psychology’ of attention (p. xi) for its
failure to cover what the author deems
non-psychological. After all, one might
argue that the topic has become so
large that no single volume could do it
justice. So how then does this book fair
as a summary of more than five dec-
ades of behavioural research in the in-
formation-processing tradition?
Pashler shows an impressive mas-
tery of the field as he tackles several
questions familiar to information-pro-
cessing researchers who rely mainly on
reaction time methods; these issues in-
clude serial versus parallel processing,
capacity limitations, and bottlenecks in
information-processing. His coverage
of dual-task limits and the psychologi-
cal refractory period reveals Pashler at
his best. Chapter 6, which is lucidly
written, authoritatively researched,
rescues several older behavioural stud-
ies from neglect, and provides an excel-
lent overview of the topic while inte-
grating research from various differing
paradigms in terms of a common
framework. Pashler’s approach is very
much a bottom-up one, basic research
leading to generalization, and from
generalizations to theory.
One of Pashler’s major claims fol-
lowing his scholarly review of the
early/late literature is that previous
theories have confounded two orthog-
onal issues. The extent to which paral-
lel processing can take place, and
whether or not perceptual gating is
possible. He suggests that both are
possible, proposing a controlled paral-
lel processing approach, suggesting
that when ‘the total complexity of per-
ceptual processing is exceeded, capac-
ity limitations emerge’ (p. 401). These
conclusions are directly related to the
recent proposals put forward by Nilli
Lavie5, although somewhat surpris-
ingly, her work is not mentioned.
Pashler’s limited discussion of the work
of other leading researchers, such as
Anne Treisman and Mike Posner, also
fails to acknowledge the influential
roles they have played in shaping this
area of research.
Pashler’s conclusions on certain
topics, such as perceptual set, are very
conservative, and were one to accept
them, would lead one to agree with
the late Stuart Sutherland’s recent
claim that ‘after many thousands of
experiments, we know only marginally
more about attention than about the
interior of a black hole’ (see Ref 6). By
contrast, Pashler makes sweeping and
controversial generalizations on other
topics (e.g. memory and awareness),
that are barely supported by the
research he cites. Furthermore, certain
of his claims are simply incorrect, for
example, that there have been very
few studies of crossmodal divided
attention (see Refs 7,8 for a recent re-
view of this extensive literature). More-
over, Pashler fails to discuss the poss-
ible implications of laboratory research
in applied settings, despite the fact
that he himself points out in the pref-
ace that ‘theoretical analysis of atten-
tion must ultimately illuminate behav-
iors and capabilities found outside the
laboratory as well as those most readily
measured inside it’ (p. ix).
In conclusion, this book provides a
valuable source of information regard-
ing behavioural studies of attention
over the past 50 years. It also makes a
valiant attempt to integrate the find-
ings from many disparate experimental
paradigms into a coherent framework,
and in the process throws up numerous
Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 3, No. 1,
research questions that have not re-
ceived sufficient attention, thus provid-
ing directions for future research. De-
spite the failure to integrate this
behavioural data with the many other
potentially converging approaches that
are emerging from neuroscience, the
sheer depth of coverage of the in-
formation-processing literature in this
volume means that it should provide a
valuable resource for many researchers
in the field, although it is probably
inappropriate for the majority of
undergraduates.
Charles Spence
Department of Experimental Psychology,
University of Oxford, South Parks Road,
Oxford, UK OX1 3UD
tel: +44 1865 271364.
fax: +44 1865 310447.
e-mail: charles.spence@psy.ox.ac.uk
References
1 Cavanagh, P. (1998) Attention: a peaceful
haven for studies of conscious information
processing Perception 27, 23
2 Parasuraman, R., ed. (1998) The Attentive
Brain, MIT Press
3 Rees, G., Frith, C.D. and Lavie, N. (1997)
Modulating irrelevant motion perception by
varying attentional load in an unrelated task
Science 278, 1616–1619
4 Driver, J. (1998) The neuropsychology of
spatial attention, in Attention (Pashler, H.
ed.), pp. 296–340, Psychology Press
5 Lavie, N. (1995) Perceptual load as a necessary
condition for selective attention J. Exp.
Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 21, 451–468
6 Sutherland, S. (1998) Feature selection
Nature 392
7 Spence, C. and Driver, J. (1997) On measuring
selective attention to a specific sensory
modality Percept. Psychophys. 59, 389–403
8 Spence, C. and Driver, J. (1997) Crossmodal
links in attention between audition, vision
and touch: implications for interface design
Int. J. Cognit. Erg. 1, 351–373
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January 1999