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Book Review: Attention and Performance III

SANDERS, A. F. (Ed.). Attention and Performance 111. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company. 1970. Pp. viii + 442. (Price not known.) The papers are frequently of only temporary interest, looking extremely frail and wilting in the rigid embrace of hard covers : and because the editor can hardly exclude a paper which was given at the actual meeting, it is too often true that the contents fall below the standard required by a journal. There are, however, certain exceptions to this depressing rule, and the first two symposia on Attention and Performance provided them. Now the third volume has done it again, and suggests that there is some magic recipe known only to Dutch psychologists, which allows them to produce these consistently important volumes in a form that has led so many other people to disaster. This volume is the report of a symposium held in Soesterberg in 1969. Although it contains 30 papers given on that occasion, every single one of them is worth reading, and some are likely to be quoted for years to come. The papers are divided into five sections, dealing with reaction processes, selective attention, subjective probability and performance, memory mechanisms and information processing, and studies on sustained attention. Each of these sub-divisions has a rather different flavour: the first splits into a number of factual contributions to topics having little to do with each other. One cluster of papers deals with multiple stimuli, one with factors altering the importance of response probability in reaction time, one with the trade-off between speed and accuracy, and a last small cluster with search processes in vision and memory. In the field of selective attention, on the other hand, there is a constant feeling that each paper should be compared and contrasted with the others, since they all deal with related topics: and variety is rather given by a range of approach between broadly sweeping theoretical accounts of attention on the one hand, new data on the other, and physiological correlates as a sideline. The section on subjective probability is again heterogeneous, perhaps the only point which marks papers in this group off from the rest of this book being the absence of information processing models in them. One paper is a review of probability learning in the multiple alternative case, one a review and fresh results on the extent to which people can produce random sequences of responses, one a choice reaction time experiment fitted to an abstract mathematical model of reaction time, and one a study of the relative effects on step tracking of the number of possible steps and of variation of sequential structure. With the fourth section on memory we are back in the realm of information processing models, with theory and results on echoic and iconic storage, retrieval, and decision processes in memory. Lastly, the fifth section on sustained attention contains papers which all deal with vigilance or with blocking in continuous work, have a high factual content and mostly look to physiological data rather than to flow diagrams within the system. What then can one say of the book as a whole? Clearly there is no dominant theme, nor does one even feel the convergence of different lines of thought before some new synthesis emerges. Rather, the impression left by the book is of an impressive body of able workers, speaking the same language and sharing certain technical and statistical techniques, but tackling a large array of fairly separate problems. There is no sign of exhaustion or boredom in this field, nor of any drop in the ability of those working in it. Part of the Dutch magic in producing these good symposia is undoubtedly skill in the selection of the speakers: but so high a percentage of successes speaks well of the quality of workers in the field generally. One is left, however, with an impression of a number of quite disparate problems each yielding a little to careful attack, rather than a co-ordinated assault on some key question of science. In keeping with this general style, perhaps the very best and most striking papers are those which are most factual and most selective in their coverage. One can instance The published reports of symposia are notoriously unsatisfactory.