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Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether deemed subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. Attention has also been referred to as the allocation of limited processing resources. Attention remains a major area of investigation within education, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsychology. Areas of active investigation involve determining the source of the sensory cues and signals that generate attention, the effects of these sensory cues and signals on the tuning properties of sensory neurons, and the relationship between attention and other behavioral and cognitive processes like working memory and vigilance. A relatively new body of research, which expands upon earlier research within neuropsychology, is investigating the diagnostic symptoms associated with traumatic brain injuries and their effects on attention. Attention also varies across cultures. The relationships between attention and consciousness are complex enough that they have warranted perennial philosophical exploration. Such exploration is both ancient and continually relevant, as it can have effects in fields ranging from mental health and the study of disorders of consciousness to artificial intelligence and its domains of research and development. ==Contemporary definition and research== Prior to the founding of psychology as a scientific discipline, attention was studied in the field of philosophy. Due to this, many of the discoveries in the field of Attention were made by philosophers. Psychologist John Watson cites Juan Luis Vives as the Father of Modern Psychology due to his book ''De Anima et Vita'' ("''The Soul and Life''") in which Vives was the first to recognize the importance of empirical investigation. In his work on memory, Vives found that the more closely one attends to stimuli, the better they will be retained. By the 1990s, psychologists began using PET and later fMRI to image the brain while monitoring attention tasks. Because of the highly expensive equipment that was generally only available in hospitals, psychologists sought for cooperation with neurologists. Pioneers of brain imaging studies of selective attention are psychologist Michael Posner (then already renowned for his seminal work on visual selective attention) and neurologist Marcus Raichle. Their results soon sparked interest from the entire neuroscience community in these psychological studies, which had until then focused on monkey brains. With the development of these technological innovations neuroscientists became interested in this type of research that combines sophisticated experimental paradigms from cognitive psychology with these new brain imaging techniques. Although the older technique of EEG had long been used to study the brain activity underlying selective attention by cognitive psychophysiologists, the ability of the newer techniques to actually measure precisely localized activity inside the brain generated renewed interest by a wider community of researchers. The results of these experiments have shown a broad agreement with the psychological, psychophysiological and the experiments performed on monkeys. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Attention」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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