Focused and distributed attention

Abstract

Recent studies on attention have emphasized distinctions between focused and distributed attention. Distributed attention has been shown to play a key role in obtaining statistical information or processing global aspects of a scene. In addition to differences in information processing, focused and distributed attention differ in terms of the way they interact with emotions. We review findings that indicate close relationship between focused attention and sad emotions as well as distributed attention and happy emotions. Given the potentially close relationship between attention and consciousness, these two types of attention may differ in terms of processes leading to awareness. We review different positions on the relationship between attention and consciousness and arguments for the existence of opposition between attention and awareness that have been made based on findings with color afterimages. We discuss our studies on attention and afterimages indicating the close linkage between different types of attention and awareness as indicated by differences in the strength of afterimages based on the type of attention deployed.