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北京理工大学普通语言学课程论文 PAGE PAGE 1 北京理工大学普通语言学课程论文 Chapter ⅠIntroduction of Attention 1.1 What is Attention? The word attention in dictionary is defined as the action of applying one’s mind to something or somebody or noticing something or somebody, a kind of particular care. As an important concept in psychology, attention refers to the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one thing while deliberately ignore other things. Among the various cognitive process in human mind, attention is usually considered as the most important. A leading psychologist William James gave us a clear definition: “everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought…it implies withdraw from something in order to deal effectively with others.( William James. 1890) Today, rather than regarding attention as a filter on input most psychologists now conceptualize it as a mechanism of cognitive processing and more specifically another instance of construction：depending on what stimulus they wish to pay attention to, people select certain pieces of information from among those they receive and construct a perception from them． The first and most basic characteristic of the mind is that it can only focus effectively on one thing at a time and can only focus on the selected goal for a short period of time before it shifted to something else．Thus, the processing capacity is limited. But sometimes the amount of new information being attended to depend on how many cognitive processing resources is needed for each stimulus. If you are confronted with a demanding task，full attention is required to accomplish it ．However, if you are doing habitual or automatic routine, you may split your attention to other activities．Therefore，it is safe to say that human cannot attend to two demanding tasks at the same time．Therefore, people should select information for processin