Is Attention Really Effort? Revisiting Daniel Kahneman’s Influential 1973 Book Attention and Effort

Attention and Effort

Mindfulness training affects attention--or is it attentional effort?

Improvements in attentional performance are at the core of proposed mechanisms for stress reduction in mindfulness meditation practices. However, this claim can be questioned because no previous studies have actively manipulated test effort in control groups and controlled for effects of stress reduction per se. In a blinded design, 48 young, healthy meditation novices were randomly assigned to...

Arousal, activation, and effort in the control of attention.

This review attempts to organize a range of neuropsychological and psycho-physiological data On attention. Three separate, but interacting, neural systems are distinguished: One controls arousal, which is defined in terms of phasic physiological responses to input. The arousal control circuits center on the amygdala. A second system controls activation, which is defined in terms of tonic physio...

Mental effort and task interference in auditory attention.

Dual-task performance was examined in three experiments. The primary task was to repeat or to add one to four digits presented auditorily at a rate of 1 digit/second. This primary task was combined with three different secondary tasks in which subjects listened to a list of words either for later recognition of some of the words (Experiment 1) or for detection and a later report of a target wor...

Divided attention and mental effort after severe traumatic brain injury.

The aim of this study was to assess dual-task performance in TBI patients, under different experimental conditions, with or without explicit emphasis on one of two tasks. Results were compared with measurement of the subjective mental effort required to perform each task. Forty-three severe TBI patients at the subacute or chronic phase performed two tasks under single- and dual-task conditions:...