On the control of attention

Abstract

An early interest in cognitive processes led me to study with Mike Posner from whom I acquired the intellectual tools to follow Hebb's (1949) advice that "Everyone knows that attention and set exist so we had better get the skeleton out of the closet and see what can be done with it." Using variants of the model task Posner developed for exploring the control of visual attention we have demonstrated that endogenous shifts of attention are not generated by unexecuted oculomotor activation, that endogenous and exogenous shifts of attention are fundamentally different on a variety of dimensions and that an aftermath of exogenous (but not endogenous) orienting, inhibition of return, facilitates search by encouraging orienting to novel items. A research strategy for understanding ambiguous forms of orienting (e.g., that controlled by conspecific gaze) is proposed.