Cumulative Progress in Formal Theories of Attention

Formal theories of attention based on similarity-choice theory and signal-detection theory are reviewed to document cumulative progress in theoretical understanding of attention from the 1950s to the present. Theories based on these models have been developed to account for a wide variety of attentional phenomena, including attention to dimensions, attention to objects, and executive control. The review describes the classical similarity-choice and signal-detection theories and relates them to current theories of categorization, Garner tasks, visual search, cuing procedures, task switching, and strategy choice.