Attention is a central concept in psychology. The term 'attention' itself has persisted, even though it implies a static, insulated capacity that we use when it is necessary to focus upon some relevant or stimulating event. Riess Jones presents a different way of thinking about attention; one that describes it as a continuous activity that is based on energy fluctuating in time. A majority of attention research fails to examine influence of event time structure (i.e., a speech utterance) on listeners' moment-to-moment attending. General research ignores listeners endowed with innate, as well as acquired, temporal biases. Here, attending is portrayed as a dynamic interaction of an individual within his or her surroundings.Importantly, this interaction involves synchronicity between an attender and external events. This emphasis on time and synchronicity distinguishes the author's theory, called Dynamic Attending Theory (DAT), from other approaches to attending which characterize attention metaphorically as a filter, resource pool, spotlight, and so on. Recent research from neuroscience has lent support to Riess Jones' theory, and the goal of this book is to bring this new research as well as her own to the wide audience of psychologists interested in attention more broadly.

Table of ContentsChapter 1: OverviewPart I: Theoretical FrameworkChapter 2: Time... and how we study itChapter 3: The Tunable BrainChapter 4: Tuning into world events: A General Attending HypothesisChapter 5: The temporal niche: An Aging HypothesisChapter 6: Tuning into very fast events: Pitch perceptionChapter 7: Tuning into Slow eventsChapter 8: Parallelism: Expectancy and production profilesPart II Applications of Theoretic constructs: To domains of music and speechChapter 9: Meter and rhythm: How we hear themChapter 10: Learning time patternsChapter 11: Musical MelodiesChapter 12: Speech TimingChapter 13: Melodies of SpeechChapter 14: Learning speech: From phonemes to syllables to wordsChapter 15: Concluding Speculations