ReviewThe American psychologist2021
An adaptive view of attentional control.
Review in The American psychologist, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Methylphenidate and sustained attention in rats: a systematic review.Psychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Prediction and Prioritisation: How Reward Learning Shapes Attentional Capture.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Review
- Feeling Like a Woman: Interoception and the Objectified Body.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- Evolutionary Mismatch, Stress, and Competition: Making Sense of Psychosocial Problems in the Polycrisis Era.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Effort expectation and strategic cue use in visual search.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Signal suppression makes search less effortful.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Attention Habit II: How selection history shapes the strategic control of attention.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Value-modulated attentional capture depends on awareness.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Adaptive suppression of threat-history stimuli.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- On dueling multi-act arithmetic: exploring the dynamics of goal-driven competition on engagement and cognition.Experimental brain research · 2025Article
- Unpredictable singleton distractors in visual search can be subject to second-order suppression.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Cognitive neuropsychological and neuroanatomic predictors of naturalistic action performance in left hemisphere stroke: A retrospective analysis.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2025Article
- Cognitive neuropsychological and neuroanatomic predictors of naturalistic action performance in left hemisphere stroke: a retrospective analysis.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Getting a grip on visual search: Relating effort exertion to the control of attention.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Review
- cpCST: a new continuous performance test for high-precision assessment of attention across the lifespan.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Trichotomy revisited: A monolithic theory of attentional control.Vision research · 2024Article
- Selection history and the strategic control of attention.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2024Article
- Prospective Distractor Information Reduces Reward-Related Attentional Capture.Journal of cognition · 2024Article
- Rethinking Distraction.Visual cognition · 2024Article
- Selection history contributes to suboptimal attention strategies.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
Although humans can voluntarily direct their attention to particular stimuli, attention can at times be involuntarily allocated to stimuli and such attentional capture can result in unproductive distraction. A challenge to any comprehensive theory of attention is to explain how involuntary mechanisms of attentional control and their potential to produce distraction are ultimately reflective of an adaptation. Traditional arguments on this topic have appealed to a generalized cost-benefit accounting. Specifically, the cost of misallocating attention to the kinds of stimuli prioritized by involuntary mechanisms of attentional control over the long run is argued to be small in comparison with the potentially life-altering cost of failing to attend to such stimuli, which involuntary mechanisms of attentional control guard against. Our understanding of these mechanisms has undergone a revolution in recent years, findings from which point to a much more sophisticated adaptation that systematically maximizes benefits associated with automating the control of attention while minimizing unwanted distraction. In this review, I provide an updated model of the adaptive nature of involuntary mechanisms of attentional control, outlining concrete principles governing the management of specific costs and benefits. I conclude that distraction does not in general constitute a failure of attentional control but rather reflects the joint product of these adaptive principles. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.