Psychological and Biological Investigation of Attention: A Term that Evades Being Defined by Technical Constructs

The American philosopher-psychologist William James once stated that “everyone knows what attention is” because it is so central to our life experiences (James, 1890). Nonetheless, more than a century later there is still disagreement about what attention means. In this conceptual study, I investigate the varieties of meaning attached to the concept. In pursuit of a better grasp of this concept, this study outlines different meanings that have contributed to our current understanding of it both in a mental and neural way. This paper represents the findings of an investigation into different aspects of attention that are both congruent and incongruent. We will explore different psychological theories of attention, neural support from which attention stems, and factors that might affect the efficiency of attention in terms of task performance and capacity.