Attention: From Theory to Practice

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.

Arthur F. Kramer is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the Beckman Institute and the Institute of Aviation. He is also Director of the Biomedical Imaging Center, Co-Director of the NIH Center of Health Minds, and Co-Chair of the Intelligent Human Computer Interaction Main Research theme at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Douglas A. Wiegmann is an Associate Professor of Human Factors in the Institute of Aviation at the University of Illinois. He also holds faculty appointments in the Department of Psychology and the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Alex Kirlik is a Professor of Human Factors in the Institute of Aviation and the Departments of Psychology, Mechanical Science & Engineering, Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering, and the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.