A selective review of selective attention research from the past century Jon Driver* University College London, UK Research on attention is concerned with selective processing of incoming sensory information. To some extent, our awareness of the world depends on what we choose to attend, not merely on the stimulation entering our senses. British psychologists have made substantial contributions to this topic in the past century. Celebrated examples include Donald Broadbent’s lter theory of attention, which set the agenda for most subsequent work; and Anne Treisman’s revisions of this account, and her later feature-integrationtheory. More recent contributions include Alan Allport’s prescient emphasis on the relevance of neuroscience data, and John Duncan’s integration of such data with psychological theory. An idiosyncratic but roughly chronological review of developments is presented, some practical and clinical implications are briey sketched, and future directions suggested. One of the biggest changes in the eld has been the increasing interplay between psychology and neuroscience, which promises much for the future. A related change has been the realization that selection attention is best thought of as a broad topic, encompassing a range of selective issues, rather than as a single explanatory process. What we see, hear, feel and remember depends not only on the information entering our senses, but also upon which aspects of this we choose to attend. William James (1890/1950, p. 402) emphasized this in asserting that ‘my experience is what I agree to attend to’. We must all have been in situations where we failed to notice something in daily life (be this a visual object, or words spoken to us) because our mind was engaged with something else. Selective attention is the generic term for those mechanisms which lead our experience to be dominated by one thing rather than another. Selective attention has become a central topic in cognitive psychology, and more recently in cognitive neuroscience also. Discussions of the topic within the British Psychological Society date back as far as 1910 (Hicks, cited in Edgell, 1947), but here I focus mainly on work from the 1950s onwards. Given this volume’s theme, I emphasize distinctive British contributions to the topic. Fortunately, these include some of the major developments in the eld, so a review emphasizing these may hopefully not become too parochial (see Pashler, 1998; Yantis, 2000, for recent reviews with less of a British emphasis). Space limits preclude an exhaustive review even of British research, so I focus on research that has particularly inuenced me. My account follows a roughly chronological structure. Many of the fundamental issues recur throughout the decades, although there have been many remarkable changes also. 53 British Journal of Psychology (2001), 92, 53–78 Printed in Great Britain © 2001 The British Psychological Society * Requests for reprints should be addressed to Jon Driver, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK (e-mail: j.driver@ucl.ac.uk).