Current research on attention?
Attention remains a major area of investigation within education, psychology and neuroscience. Many of the major debates of James’ time remain unresolved. For example, although most scientists accept that attention can be split, strong proof has remained elusive. And there is still no widely accepted definition of attention more concrete than that given in the James quote above. This lack of progress has led many observers to speculate that attention refers to many separate processes without a common mechanism.
Areas of active investigation involve determining the source of the signals that generate attention, the effects of these signals on the tuning properties of sensory neurons, and the relationship between attention and other cognitive processes like working memory. A relatively new body of research is investigating the phenomenon of traumatic brain injuries and their effects on attention. TBIs are a fairly common occurrence in a significant segment of the population and often result in diminished attention.
Main article: Visual attention
Main article: Auditory attention
Overt and Covert Attention
What we look at may not be what we attend to. It is possible to look in one direction but actually notice changes in another direction. Overt attention is the act of directing our eyes or ears towards a stimulus source. Covert attention is the act of mentally focusing on a particular stimulus. Covert attention is thought to be a neural process that enhances the signal from a particular part of the sensory panorama.
Why should we have these two disjoint mechanisms for directing spatial attention? There are studies that show that the two mechanisms may not be so disjoint. Work by the group of Rizzolatti have suggested that, though humans and primates can look in one direction but attend in another, there is underlying neural circuitry that links shifts in covert attention to plans to shift gaze. So, if we attend to the right hand corner of our eye, we `want’ to move our eyes in that direction, and have to actively suppress the eye movement that is linked to this shift in attention.
The current view is that visual covert attention is a mechanism for quickly scanning the field of view for interesting locations. This shift in covert attention is linked to eye movement circuitry that sets up a slower saccade to that location.