Attentional spotlight is the shifting of our limited selective attention around the environment to highlight stimuli for enhanced processing. Since it is impossible to process everything in our environment at once, we must isolate or "spotlight" was is truly important to us against the noisy background. 

Attentional Spotlight

Dichotic presentation is where participants listen to two different streams of dialog delivered simultaneously to the left and right ears.

Dichotic Presentation

One of the important functions of attention is to act as a filter, blocking unimportant stimuli and directing cognitive resources to only the most important  events, and thereby protecting the brain from being overwhelmed by the world.

Attentional Bottleneck

- Attentional Spotlight
- Dichotic Presentation
- Attentional Bottleneck

New York University

A divided attention task is a task in which the participant is asked to simultaneously focus attention on two or more stimuli. 

Divided Attention Tasks

Breedlove, S. & Watson, N. (2017). Behavioral neuroscience, eighth edition. Oxford University Press.

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