¹⁶The word “attention” is quite overloaded with different meanings in cognitive psychology. The sensory attention we have considered here is very different from some other kinds of attention. In particular, another type of attention very relevant for this book is sustained attention, considered in Chapter 9, which means you try to concentrate on a single task, such as reading a book, for an extended period of time. That is very different from sensory selective attention considered here since sustained attention is about long-term attention on a task instead of relatively short-term attention on sensory objects. Selective attention can further be divided on another axis: bottom-up attention, where an external stimulus grabs your attention (as in the case of interrupts in Chapter 8), and top-down attention, used for example when you search for a certain person in a big room and only pay attention to faces. (The exact terms used in the different cases are quite variable in the literature.)