Attention: Theory and Practice

by Addie Johnson, Robert W. Proctor

Attention: Theory and Practice provides a balance between a readable overview of attention and an emphasis on how theories and paradigms for the study of attention have developed. The book highlights the important issues and major findings while giving sufficient details of experimental studies, models, and theories so that results and conclusions are easy to follow and evaluate. Rather than brushing over tricky technical details, the authors explain them clearly, giving readers the benefit of understanding the motivation for and techniques of the experiments in order to allow readers to think through results, models, and theories for themselves.

Attention is an accessible text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in psychology, as well as an important resource for researchers and practitioners interested in gaining an overview of the field of attention.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published December 19, 2003

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine my horror on realizing we were going to be studying a post-graduate textbook published 12 years ago!

Turns out I need not have worried: it is very well organized and a good didactic work. Complicated topics are clearly and carefully explained and reexplained. The extra chapter in the Spanish edition means you start zoomed out, getting a nice overview of the topic, before zooming in on each individual topic in later chapters, making it much easier to understand than most UNED textbooks, which just throw you in the deep end.

There is further repetition in the footnotes and the annexes at the end of the book, meaning most concepts are explained in at least two different ways, if not more, and you can not help but revise complicated topics as you go along. It really is very good.

How fast can you react to a red light flashing on a screen? What about of it is preceded by a sound? It's not the type of book anyone would ever read unless they had to. It would have been wonderful to get more practical real life applications. More about ADHD (which is mentioned only once) and other personal accounts of problems related to these functions. Even if they were just bubbles in the margins not meant to be put on any syllabus. In any case, I gave up thinking studying psychology had anything to do with studying anything subjective quite a while ago.