Attention and Visual Perception: Analyzing Divided Attention

Attention is one of the most active areas of experimental research in cognitive science. This chapter focuses on an aspect of attention that has been studied intensively over the past twenty-five years or so: capacity limitations on our ability to perceive multiple visual inputs. The basic questions are simple but far-reaching. How much visual information can we take in at one time? What can we do with this information? Do we recognize objects one at a time, or can we recognize a large number simultaneously? This chapter describes several different methods that investigators have used to address these questions, along with some of the most important conclusions to emerge from this research.