Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do We Direct Attention and Control Thought?
Use cueing to connect an everyday shift of attention with a measurable comparison. Distinguish orienting, readiness, and executive control before treating attention as one capacity.
A question to consider. A cue helps only when it appears sufficiently early. What would changing cue validity and delay reveal that the average benefit alone cannot?
Why this reading
Posner revisits how attention became experimentally tractable: vary a cue, measure its consequences, and distinguish selecting information from moving the eyes. The retrospective connects these comparisons to sensory processing and brain networks while acknowledging changes in the author's own interpretation.
Before you read
Orienting means giving priority to a location or source of information. Covert orienting occurs without an overt eye movement. A valid cue identifies the eventual target location; an invalid cue directs attention elsewhere. Alerting concerns readiness, whereas executive control concerns coordinating processing with a goal.
Read for
- Follow how cue probability and cue-to-target delay distinguish initial capture from later orienting toward a likely location.
- Separate faster responses, altered sensory processing, and evidence about the neural sources of those effects.
- Examine the qualifications concerning eye movements, interactions among attention networks, and the reliability of individual network scores.
Consider afterwards
- An uninformative flash speeds responses to a nearby target briefly, but a predictive symbol helps later. What comparison would distinguish their time courses while checking that participants kept their eyes still?
Editorial context
This is a retrospective synthesis, not a new experiment or a neutral inventory of all attention theories. The orienting framework is influential, but labels for functions do not establish independent modules. Its developmental and training discussions extend beyond the cueing evidence; claims about lasting everyday benefits require their own support. The original 1980 paper offers historical depth.