Attend  -  To attend an object or an event is to pay attention to it, making it available for further high-level processing.

Attention  -  Attention is what enables us to process information about the world around us. We can only be aware of things around us if we pay attention to them. We can think of attention as a spotlight that we shine on things in the world around us to make them stand out. When something "stands out," we notice it, bringing it into our awareness, and then process or interpret it. Attention can change rapidly, switching from one thing to another. It can be steered by our intentions ("top-down"), as when we look for a particular face in a crowd, or it can be steered by features of objects in the world ("bottom-up"), as when our attention is grabbed by a police car's flashing lights in our rearview mirror. Preattentive processes help us decide what to pay attention to and what to filter out and ignore. Attention filters and feeds information about the world around us into our minds.

Automatic  -  An action that is automatic requires fewer attentional resources, and so is resistant to interference.

Bottom-Up  -  "Bottom-up" refers to anything that directs our attention from the outside, such as a sudden noise or flash of light that draws our attention away from whatever we were doing.

Broadbent's Filter Theory  -  Broadbent, a psychological researcher, theorized that a filter sifts through all the stimuli we are exposed to and decides what to let in though a single channel.

Channel  -  A channel is a single event or stream of information that enters our senses, such as a line of text on a page or a voice on the radio. According to Broadbent's filter theory, a person can only attend to one channel at a time, filtering out all other sensory information.

Cocktail-Party Effect  -  Even when we are attending to only one channel, as when we listen to a single conversation at a cocktail party, our attention can still be grabbed by a word of personal importance to us, such as our own name, spoken in another conversation.

Dichotic Listening  -  In a dichotic listening task, subjects hear two voices at a time, and they must listen to and process the words of one voice, called the attended voice. Subjects are unable to process the content of the second, unattended voice, suggesting that there are limits to the capacity of our attention.

Feature  -  A feature is a basic physical property of a thing, such as the timbre of a person's voice or the color of a ball.

Interference  -  Interference occurs when multiple items or events compete for our attention. Because we have limited resources, our attention suffers when we are distracted.

Shadowing  -  Shadowing is an ongoing task, often part of dichotic listening, in which subjects must repeat the words spoken by a voice heard over a set of headphones as the voice speaks them.

Stroop Task  -  The Stroop task demonstrates how some tasks can become automatic through practice, and also provides a good example of interference.

Top-Down  -  "Top-down" refers to anything that directs our attention from the inside, such as our own intentions and expectations.