Attention Control: A Cornerstone of Higher-Order Cognition

Abstract

For years, psychologists have wondered why people who are highly skilled in one cognitive domain tend to be skilled in other cognitive domains, too. In this article, we explain how attention control provides a common thread among broad cognitive abilities, including fluid intelligence, working memory capacity, and sensory discrimination. Attention control allows us to pursue our goals despite distractions and temptations, to deviate from the habitual, and to keep information in mind amid a maelstrom of divergent thought. Highlighting results from our lab, we describe the role of attention control in information maintenance and disengagement and how these functions contribute to performance in a variety of complex cognitive tasks. We also describe a recent undertaking in which we developed new and improved attention-control tasks, which had higher reliabilities, stronger intercorrelations, and higher loadings on a common factor than traditional measures. From an applied perspective, these new attention-control tasks show great promise for use in personnel selection assessments. We close by outlining exciting avenues for future research.

High fluid intelligence is characterized by flexible allocation of attentional resources: Evidence from EEG

“…This idea also echoes recent intelligence theories such as the MD theory (Duncan, 2010;Duncan, Assem, & Shashidhara, 2020) and the attentional control account of intelligence (Burgoyne & Engle, 2020;Engle, 2018). Researchers proposed that attentional control plays a core role in higher-order cognition, which allows us to focus on goals despite distractions and irrelevant thoughts (Burgoyne & Engle, 2020). Tsukahara et al (2020) found that attentional control fully mediated the relationship between Gf and sensory discrimination ability, suggesting that attentional control may lay the foundation for higher-order cognition such as Gf.…”

“…Importantly, as the suggestions by recent researchers (Ramchandran, Zeien, & Andreasen, 2019), the efficiency of highly intelligent people may not be simply characterised as using fewer or more resources in any conditions but be featured as adaptively choosing the optimal resource allocation policy according to particular task demands (Dunst et al, 2014). This idea also echoes recent intelligence theories such as the MD theory (Duncan, 2010;Duncan, Assem, & Shashidhara, 2020) and the attentional control account of intelligence (Burgoyne & Engle, 2020;Engle, 2018). Researchers proposed that attentional control plays a core role in higher-order cognition, which allows us to focus on goals despite distractions and irrelevant thoughts (Burgoyne & Engle, 2020).…”

“…The integrated control hypothesis emphasizes that higher Gf people have a better ability of attention control that could flexibly and adaptively allocate their limited resources according to specific task demands rather than simply allocating fewer or more resources. The idea of the integrated control hypothesis echoes another suggestion about human intelligence that high Gf people have better attentional control (also referred to as cognitive control and executive control) ability that could help them flexibly and smoothly solve cognitive tasks (Burgoyne & Engle, 2020;Rueda, 2018). Similarly, the multiple-demand (MD) theory of human intelligence (Duncan, 2010;Duncan, Assem, & Shashidhara, 2020) suggested that a wide-spread brain network that could adaptively and flexibly encode task-relevant information according to the task demands is the neural basis of Gf.…”

Mitochondrial Functioning and the Relations among Health, Cognition, and Aging: Where Cell Biology Meets Cognitive Science

“…As noted by Kane and Engle [ 140 ], executive attention refers to “a capacity whereby memory representations are maintained in a highly active state in the presence of interference, and these representations may reflect goal plans, action states, or task-relevant stimuli in the environment.” [ 140 ] (p. 638). Executive attention is maintained by a large-scale intermodular network anchored by areas within the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and individual differences in the functioning of this network, along with reasoning and problem-solving abilities, explain much of common variation across cognitive abilities [ 140 , 141 , 142 ].…”

A Post-Encoding Pre-Production Reinstatement (PEPPR) Model of Dual-List Free Recall

“…Individual and group differences. Individual differences in context processing have long been linked to differences in memory ability (Healey, Crutchley, & Kahana, 2014;Kane, Conway, Hambrick, & Engle, 2007;Sahakyan, Abushanab, Smith, & Gray, 2014;Unsworth & Spillers, 2010b), particularly in situations that require overcoming interference (Burgoyne & Engle, 2020;Hasher & Zacks, 1988;Healey, 2016;Kane & Engle, 2000;Unsworth & Engle, 2007). There have been few attempts to formally model these differences Lehman & Malmberg, 2013).…”