Introduction. Access and Mediation: Attention Beyond Selectivity

Basically, everyone seems to know what attention is. It is a phenomenon that we encounter every day in our own experience, where it appears as a subjective performance in the form of a deliberately executed concentration. In psychology as well as in philosophy, attention is mostly regarded as an expression of the selective character of perception and thought, one that allows us to occupy ourselves with certain things usually for a particular purpose, while allowing other possible contents of consciousness to fade into the background and away from our focus. In this respect, the definition of attention by the psychologist William James has not lost its meaning: “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. [. . .] It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others [. . .].” (James 1890, 403–404). The failure to concentrate or to employ selective attention strategies would seem to prevent our ability to execute a task, to work or to perform acts of thinking effectively; a lack of attention is seen as a distraction, as mind-wandering, or it can be defined in its more pathological forms as Attention Deficit disorder. Since the industrial revolution, from the mechanization of labor up to the recent digitalization of work and of our private environments, such ‘lacks’ of attention have increasingly become a problem for science, education and for the economy to solve. Starting with the sensory and informational demands of the technological workplace, such as the cockpits of British pilots in World War II, early cognitive psychology began its research on attention with the aim to respond to informational overloads. Such research assumes a limitation of the human processing system, in which only a few pieces of information can be processed properly per given time frame. In this sense, attention was understood as a kind of filter mechanism, one that ‘decides’ which information is permitted access to a deeper level of processing and thereby may find its way into our consciousness and memory. In the history of experimental research in cognitive psychol-