In the past two decades, attention has been one of the most investigated areas of research in perception and cognition. However, the literature on the field contains a bewildering array of findings, and empirical progress has not been matched by consensus on major theoretical issues. The Psychology of Attention presents a systematic review of the main lines of research on attention; the topics range from perception of threshold stimuli to memory storage and decision making. The book develops empirical generalizations about the major issues and suggests possible underlying theoretical principles.

Pashler argues that widely assumed notions of processing resources and automaticity are of limited value in understanding human information processing. He proposes a central bottleneck for decision making and memory retrieval, and describes evidence that distinguishes this limitation from perceptual limitations and limited-capacity short-term memory.