... instinctual and conditioned attention. Finallay it will look at disciplines, in which increased power over the selection or choice to what one attends to is a goal. William James (1890) distinguished between "active" and "passive" modes of attention. What he calls active attention is selective attention. It is controlled in a a top-down way by the individual's goals. The passive mode of attention James referred to is controlled by external stimuli (e.g. a quick movement) in a bottom-up way. "Stimulus-driven attentional control is both faster and more potent then goal-driven attentional control" (Yantis, 1998), because it usually takes time and effort to decide which stimuli will be the most useful to attain the current goal. There is a substantial difference between focused and divided attention. Focused attention is when one focuses on only one stimulus at a time. In the case of divided attention, several stimulus are presented and are ...

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