van der Stigchel, S. How Attention Works.

Abstract

A policeman overlooks his colleagues assaulting an innocent passerby and is wrongly accused of obscuring their misjudgments, a car driver fails to notice a scooter and causes an accident, and-as if these incidents on their own did not make for a highly unfortunate Saturday-you lose sight of your tent at a festival and find yourself trudging through muddy puddles in search for green tarp. Although seemingly unconnected, all of these events illustrate a fundamental property of the human visual system: We consciously perceive only small chunks of the visual world that surrounds us in all its detail. In his book How Attention Works, Stefan van der Stigchel sets out to explain how visual attention shapes our experience of the environment and argues that a selective attentional focus can have detrimental consequences when misguided but ultimately enables us to function effectively in a world of distraction. Across seven chapters, van der Stigchel provides a broad overview of visual attention and its interplay with perception, action, and memory. Ingeniously, he coins the term "attention architects." It describes all those strategically guiding our focus of attention-website designers, teachers, traffic engineers, advertising agents, magicians, and perhaps youwho attempt to influence what aspects of the world we perceive or fail to register. In a casual tone, van der Stigchel reviews the science behind what, in these trades, is often based on intuition, experience, or training. He describes pre-attentive limitations on perception and illustrates the existence of an attentional filter mechanism that shapes how we search visual scenes. The author then outlines the interplay between visual attention and eye movements and explains how implicit long-term memory resulting from prior exposure to a situation can guide the spotlight of attention. In his final chapter, he describes various slips of attention-both pathological and nonpathological-and concludes that "it is when things go wrong that we realize that our ability to see the entire picture is just an illusion" (p. 115). Van der Stigchel does not shy away from classical vision science terms. Among others, his book includes explanations of salience, luminance adaptation, crowding, change blindness, pop-out and serial search, inhibition of return, and cueing. While these concepts are well known to the vision science community, How Attention Works will certainly appeal to a wider audience including undergraduate students and complete novices. In fact, an