Learning Objectives

After completing this chapter you should be able to:

  • When somebody tells you to “pay attention” what does he or she mean? How do we define attention?
  • What descriptions of attention have helped researchers study attention?
  • How do researchers study what someone is and is not paying attention to?
  • What factors in the environment have been found to influence our attention abilities?
  • How does our automatic processing affect what we pay attention to?