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Cognitive neuroscience

How do you pay attention?

Nature volume 400, pages 813–815 (1999)Cite this article

It has been dry in eastern Massachusetts and, as a consequence, we have been watering the tomatoes. There are two ways to water tomatoes. One is to take the hose or watering-can and go from plant to plant, watering each in ‘series’. The other is to spray the entire patch, watering all the plants at the same time in ‘parallel’. If visitors arrive after the job is done the tomato patch will obviously be wet, but it will not be clear whether the deployment of water was serial or parallel.

Although this serial/parallel distinction may be of minimal importance in the watering of suburban vegetables, it has been central in attempts to understand our ability to process visual information. Your eyes present your brain with more information than it can fully process. So, for example, even if the print was made large enough, you could not read this article at the same time as you read another. You must select, or ‘attend’, one chunk of text. To understand how we see, we must understand how we attend1. The results of the latest attempts to distinguish between serial and parallel modes of attention are reported by Woodman and Luck2 on page 867of this issue. These findings favour the serial view.

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Figure 1: How do we see the C? When looking for a particular object — the left-facing letter C, for example — you may either process each letter in turn (attending in ‘series’), or you might try to scan all of the letters at once (attending in ‘parallel’).

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  1. Center for Ophthalmic Research, Brigham and Womens Hospital, 221 Longwood Avenue, Boston, 02115, Massachusetts, USA

    Jeremy M. Wolfe

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  1. Jeremy M. Wolfe
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Wolfe, J. How do you pay attention?. Nature 400, 813–815 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/23579

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