Combining attention: a novel way of conceptualizing the links between attention, sensory processing, and behavior

Many everyday behaviors appear to require both the interpretation of incoming sensory information and the maintenance of a current task goal. This intuitive notion suggests that combining attentional control processes might reflect a fundamentally novel way in which attention supports complex behavior. Using an established paradigm, here we show that joint recruitment in multiple attention control systems leads to corresponding combined increases in behavior and underlying sensory processing of attended targets. Moreover, our data also revealed that the nature of the combined effect depends on a flexible allocation of attentional resources to individual component processes, which change dynamically as a function of task demands. Together, these data provide a new conceptual framework for characterizing the role of attention in behavior and suggest important extensions to the prevailing theories of attention.