Is an individual able to attend to more than one thing at a time? There is little dispute that human beings and other animals selectively attend to some of the information available to them at the expense of the remainder. One reason advanced for this is the limited capacity of the brain, which cannot process all available information simultaneously, yet everyday experience shows that people are able to do several things at the same time.

A bottleneck restricts the rate of flow, as, say, in the narrow neck of a milk bottle. The narrower the bottleneck, the lower the rate of flow. Broadbent's, Treisman's, and Deutsch and Deutsch Models of Attention are all bottleneck models because they predict we cannot consciously attend to all of our sensory input at the same time. This limited capacity for paying attention is therefore a bottleneck and the models each try to explain how the material that passes through the bottleneck is selected.

Selective attention is the process of focusing on a particular object in the environment for a certain period of time. Attention is a limited resource, so selective attention allows us to tune out unimportant details and focus on what really matters.

In this paper we illustrate how the capacity to select the most appropriate actions when handling contexts affording multiple conflicting actions can be solved either through a selective attention strategy (in which the stimuli affording alternative actions are filtered out at the perceptual level through top-down regulation) or at later processing stages through an action selection strategy (through the suppression of the premotor information eliciting alternative actions).

To the extent that selective attention skills are relevant for academic foundations and amenable to training, they represent an important focus for the field of education. Here, drawing on research on the neurobiology of attention, we review hypothesized links between selective attention and processing across three domains important to early academic skills.

In the present study, we investigated the effects of selective attention at encoding on conceptual object priming (Experiment 1) and old–new recognition memory (Experiment 2) tasks in young and older adults. The procedures of both experiments included encoding and memory test phases separated by a short delay.