Contributors from psychology and engineering consider theories of human attention, methods of researching it, and ways to improve attention or account for the lack of it in various contexts. Among their topics are individual differences in attention and working memory, multi-tasking in the automobile, support for aging adults, designing multi-sensory displays, and emphasizing change as a training protocol for high-demand tasks. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
The study of attention in the laboratory has been crucial to understanding the mechanisms that support several different facets of attentional processing: Our ability to both divide attention among multiple tasks and stimuli, and selectively focus it on task-relevant information, while ignoring distracting task-irrelevant information, as well as how top-down and bottom-up factors influence the way that attention is directed within and across modalities. Equally important, however, is research that has attempted to scale up to the real world this empirical work on attention that has traditionally been well controlled by limited laboratory paradigms and phenomena. These types of basic and theoretically guided applied research on attention have benefited immeasurably from the work of Christopher Wickens. This book honors Wickens' many important contributions to the study of attention by bringing together researchers who examine real-world attentional problems and questions in light of attentional theory. The research fostered by Wickens' contributions will enrich not only our understanding of human performance in complex real-world systems, but also reveal the gaps on our knowledge of basic attentional processes.
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