Attention
Research suggests a close link between the working memory capacities of a person and their ability to control the information from the environment that they can selectively enhance or ignore. Such attention allows for example for the voluntarily shifting in regard to goals of a person's information processing to spatial locations or objects rather than ones that capture their attention due to their sensory saliency (such as an ambulance siren). The goal directing of attention is driven by "top-down" signals from the PFC that bias processing in posterior cortical areas and saliency capture by "bottom-up" control from subcortical structures and the primary sensory cortices. The ability to override sensory capture of attention differs greatly between individuals and this difference closely links to their working memory capacity. The greater a person's working memory capacity, the greater their ability to resist sensory capture. The limited ability to override attentional capture is likely to result in the unnecessary storage of information in working memory, suggesting not only that having a poor working memory affects attention but that it can also limit the capacity of working memory even further. (low attention <=> low working memory).
Read more about this topic: Working Memory
Famous quotes containing the word attention:
“Children pay little attention to their parent’s teachings, but reproduce their characters faithfully.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one’s style, both of speaking and writing.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)