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Attention is defined as selection for action...
Norman and Shallice (1986) recognized that any successful attentional system
must always be open to the possibility that at any time current engagement will be interrupted by the imposition of a new
superordinate goal to protect an organism from danger or harm..
An attentional system must be able to cope with environments that are (a)
partly or wholly unpredictable, (b) can change suddenly, and (c) offer multiple, competing, or contradictory goals. As Allport
suggests,
The primary purpose of an attentional system must be to ensure the coherence of behavior under these often conflicting
constraints. Coherent, goal directed behavior requires processes of selective priority assignment and
coordination at many different levels (motivational, cognitive, motor, sensory). Together this
set of selective and coordinative processes can be said to make up the effective attentional engagement (or attentional set) of an organism at any moment. (1989, p. 652)
The problem then for any model of attention is that it must account for the two potentially contradictory requirements
of an attentional mechanism: "the need for continuity of attentional engagement, against the need for its interruptibility"
(Allport, 1989, p. 652)...
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