Attention and performance

This chapter is a critical review and reappraisal of current theories of ‘attention’. In particular it offers a critique of the idea of general- purpose processing capacity as a metaphor for understanding human performance limitations in concurrent tasks. The chapter does not pretend to put forward, in its place, a complete theory of ‘attention’. Indeed, one of its objectives is to show how various phenomena that have been attributed to the limitations of something called ‘attention’ demand quite diverse sorts of explanation.