High attention and availability of ample attentional resources can be implemented by low degrees of regulation and inhibition.
This type of allocation of attentional resources is commonly called "divided attention".
Scientists are starting to learn more about how the brain allocates its attentional resources -- and how our attention gets away from us.
Based on brain activity, they found that the babies of more-mindful mamas payed less attention to the repetitious, irrelevant sounds--indicating an efficient use of attentional resources.
Both experiments demonstrate an extreme form of blindness to a meaningful visual stimulus, even in the absence of a second stimulus that would compete for attentional resources.
They found that the participants' memory for the faces they saw during the "no go" trials was far worse than for the rest, and therefore hypothesized that response inhibition competes with memory encoding for common attentional resources.
Because attentional resources are limited, filtering of stimuli must occur.
In a passive context, test participants can dedicate their attentional resources to assessing multimedia quality.
In an interactive context, they are asked to fulfil a task which requires attentional resources.
It was hypothesized by Kahneman that the attentional resources are limited in quantity [25].
But the underlying problem remains the same: finite attentional resources and our limited task-switching ability.
