tasks. neural correlates most experiments show that one neural correlate of attention is enhanced firing. if a neuron has a certain response to a stimulus when the animal is not attending to the stimulus, then when the animal does attend to the stimulus, the neuron's response will be enhanced even if the physical characteristics of the stimulus remain the same. in a 2007 review, knudsen describes a more general model which identifies four core processes of attention, with working memory at the center: working memory temporarily stores information for detailed analysis. competitive selection is the process that determines which information gains access to working memory. through top-down sensitivity control, higher cognitive processes can regulate signal intensity in information channels that compete for access to working memory, and thus give them an advantage in the process of competitive selection. through top-down sensitivity control, the momentary content of working memory can influence the selection of new information, and thus mediate voluntary control of attention in a recurrent loop (endogenous attention). bottom-up saliency filters automatically enhance the response to infrequent stimuli, or stimuli of instinctive or learned biological relevance (exogenous attention). neurally, at different hierarchical levels spatial maps can enhance or inhibit activity in sensory areas, and induce orienting behaviors like eye movement. at the top of the hierarchy, the frontal eye fields (fef) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex contain a retinocentric spatial map. microstimulation in the fef induces monkeys to make a saccade to the relevant location. stimulation at levels too low to induce a saccade will nonetheless enhance cortical responses to stimuli located in the relevant area. at the next lower level, a variety of spatial maps are found in the parietal cortex. in particular, the lateral intraparietal area (lip) contains a saliency map and is interconnected both with the fef and with sensory areas. exogenous attentional guidance in humans and monkeys is by a bottom-up saliency map in the primary visual cortex. in lower vertebrates, this saliency map is more likely in the superior colliculus (optic tectum). certain automatic responses that influence attention, like orienting to a highly salient stimulus, are mediated subcortically by the superior colliculi. at the neural network level, it is thought that processes like lateral inhibition mediate the process of competitive selection. in many cases attention produces changes in the eeg. many animals, including humans, produce gamma waves (40–60 hz) when focusing attention on a particular object or activity. another commonly used model for the attention system has been put forth by researchers such as michael posner. he divides attention into three functional components: alerting, orienting, and executive attention that can also interact and influence each other. alerting is the process involved in becoming and staying attentive toward the surroundings. it appears to exist in the frontal and parietal lobes of the right hemisphere, and is modulated by norepinephrine. orienting is the directing of attention to a specific stimulus. executive attention is used when there is a conflict between multiple attention cues. it is essentially the same as the central executive in baddeley's model of working memory. the eriksen flanker task has shown that the executive control of attention may take place in the anterior cingulate cortex cultural variation children appear to develop patterns of attention related to the cultural practices of their families, communities, and the institutions in which they participate. in 1955, jules henry suggested that there are societal differences in sensitivity to signals from many ongoing sources that call for the awareness of several levels of attention simultaneously. he tied his speculation to ethnographic observations of communities in which children are involved in a complex social community with multiple relationships. many indigenous children in the americas predominantly learn by observing and pitching in. there are several studies to support that the use of keen attention towards learning is much more common in indigenous communities of north and central america than in a middle-class european-american setting. this is a direct result of the learning by observing and pitching in model. keen attention is both a requirement and result of learning by observing and pitching-in. incorporating the children in the community gives them the opportunity to keenly observe and contribute to activities that were not directed towards them. it can be seen from different indigenous communities and cultures, such as the mayans of san pedro, that children can simultaneously attend to multiple events. most maya children have learned to pay attention to several events at once in order to make useful observations. one example is simultaneous attention which involves uninterrupted attention to several activities occurring at the same time. another cultural practice that may relate to simultaneous attention strategies is coordination within a group. san pedro toddlers and caregivers frequently coordinated their activities with other members of a group in multiway engagements rather than in a dyadic fashion. research concludes that children with close ties to indigenous american roots have a high tendency to be especially keen observers. this learning by observing and pitching-in model requires active levels of attention management. the child is present while caretakers engage in daily activities and responsibilities such as: weaving, farming, and other skills necessary for survival. being present allows the child to focus their attention on the actions being performed by their parents, elders, and/or older siblings. in order to learn in this way, keen attention and focus is required. eventually the child is expected to be able to perform these skills themselves. modelling in the domain of computer vision, efforts have been made to model the mechanism of human attention, especially the bottom-up intentional mechanism and its semantic significance in classification of video contents. both spatial attention and temporal attention have been incorporated in such classification efforts. generally speaking, there are two kinds of models to mimic the bottom-up salience mechanism in static images. one way is based on the spatial contrast analysis. for example, a center–surround mechanism has been used to define salience across scales, inspired by the putative neural mechanism. it has also been hypothesized that some visual inputs are intrinsically salient in certain background contexts and that these are actually task-independent. this model has established itself as the exemplar for salience detection and consistently used for comparison in the literature; the other way is based on the frequency domain analysis. this method was first proposed by hou et al., this method was called sr, and then pqft method was also introduced. both sr and pqft only use the phase information. in 2012, the hft method was introduced, and both the amplitude and the phase information are made use of. the neural abstraction pyramid is a hierarchical recurrent convolutional model, which incorporates bottom-up and top-down flow of information to iteratively interpret images. hemispatial neglect main article: hemispatial neglect hemispatial neglect, also called unilateral neglect, often occurs when people have damage to their right hemisphere. this damage often leads to a tendency to ignore the left side of one's body or even the left side of an object that can be seen. damage to the left side of the brain (the left hemisphere) rarely yields significant neglect of the right side of the body or object in the person's local environments. the effects of spatial neglect, however, may vary and differ depending on what area of the brain was damaged. damage to different neural substrates can result in different types of neglect. attention disorders (lateralized and nonlaterized) may also contribute to the symptoms and effects. much research has asserted that damage to gray matter within the brain results in spatial neglect. new technology has yielded more information, such that there is a large, distributed network of frontal, parietal, temporal, and subcortical brain areas that have been tied to neglect. this network can be related to other research as well; the dorsal attention network is tied to spatial orienting. the effect of damage to this network may result in patients neglecting their left side when distracted about their right side or an object on their right side. attention in social contexts social attention is one special form of attention that involves the allocation of limited processing resources in a social context. previous studies on social attention often regard how attention is directed toward socially relevant stimuli such as faces and gaze directions of other individuals. in contrast to attending-to-others, a different line of researches has shown that self-related information such as own face and name automatically captures attention and is preferentially processed comparing to other-related information. these contrasting effects between attending-to-others and attending-to-self prompt a synthetic view in a recent opinion article proposing that social attention operates at two polarizing states: in one extreme, individual tends to attend to the self and prioritize self-related information over others', and, in the other extreme, attention is allocated to other individuals to infer their intentions and desires. attending-to-self and attending-to-others mark the two ends of an otherwise continuum spectrum of social attention. for a given behavioral context, the mechanisms underlying these two polarities might interact and compete with each other in order to determine a saliency map of social attention that guides our behaviors. an imbalanced competition between these two behavioral and cognitive processes will cause cognitive disorders and neurological symptoms such as autism spectrum disorders and williams syndrome. distracting factors according to daniel goleman's book, focus: the hidden driver of excellence, there are two types of distracting factors affecting focus – sensory and emotional. a sensory distracting factor would be, for example, while a person is reading this article, they are neglecting the white field surrounding the text. an emotional distracting factor would be when someone is focused on answering an email, and somebody shouts their name. it would be almost impossible to neglect the voice speaking it. attention is immediately directed toward the source. positive emotions have also been found to affect attention. induction of happiness has led to increased response times and an increase in inaccurate responses in the face of irrelevant stimuli. two possible theories as to why emotions might make one more susceptible to distracting stimuli is that emotions take up too much of one's cognitive resources and make it harder to control your focus of attention. the other theory is that emotions make it harder to filter out distractions, specifically with positive emotions due to a feeling of security. another distracting factor to attention processes is insufficient sleep. sleep deprivation is found to impair cognition, specifically performance in divided attention. divided attention is possibly linked with the circadian processes. failure to attend inattentional blindness was first introduced in 1998 by arien mack and irvic rock. their studies show that when people are focused on specific stimuli, they often miss other stimuli that are clearly present. though actual blindness is not occurring here, the blindness that happens is due to the perceptual load of what is being attended to. based on the experiment performed by mack and rock, ula finch and nilli lavie tested participants with a perceptual task. they presented subjects with a cross, one arm being longer than the other, for 5 trials. on the sixth trial, a white square was added to the top left of the screen. the results conclude that out of 10 participants, only 2 (20%) actually saw the square. this would suggest that when a higher focus was attended to the length of the crossed arms, the more likely someone would altogether miss an object that was in plain sight. change blindness was first tested by rensink and coworkers in 1997. their studies show that people have difficulty detecting changes from scene to scene due to the intense focus on one thing, or lack of attention overall. this was tested by rensink through a presentation of a picture, and then a blank field, and then the same picture but with an item missing. the results showed that the pictures had to be alternated back and forth a good number of times for participants to notice the difference. this idea is greatly portrayed in films that have continuity errors. many people do not pick up on differences when in reality, the changes tend to be significant. history of the study philosophical period psychologist daniel e. berlyne credits the first extended treatment of attention to philosopher nicolas malebranche in his work "the search after truth". "malebranche held that