ich the visual system becomes capacity limited. Early selection models suggest that attention selects what will be processed and late selection models suggest that everything gets processed but attention determines what is brought into awareness. Dobkins and Bosworth examined the effects of cueing on motion processing. They asked subjects to judge motion direction of the stimuli presented in conditions where subjects either received a cue or did not receive a cue telling them which portion of the display to attend. Detectability thresholds were determined for each subject in pre-cued and non pre-cued conditions and in single and multiple display conditions. The results suggested that observers were able to process multiple stimuli at one time and that the benefit of the pre-cue may be to eliminate the time required to orient attention. The pre-cue benefit was not significant at longer stimulus durations. The uncued noise distractors actually seemed to enhance processing of the motion stimulus suggesting that there is some pre-attentive processing of the noise distractors. There was a small benefit of the pre-cue in a single display condition suggesting that the pre-cue served to decrease the time needed for the observer to orient attention to the proper location in the display. The conclusion here is that attention serves to both enhance processing and reduce the cognitive resources allocated to distractors and agreed with Pashler (1998) that a controlled parallel process could explain the results. That is to say, we can process many things at once, but can also willfully select objects that will receive processing while ignoring items that are irrelevant. These findings also agree with fMRI research showing that the attentional load of a task will modulate the resources available for processing information that is not relevant to the task(Rees & Lavie, 2001)....
