Abstract

A primary theme in attention research is that there is too much information in our environment for everything to be processed and, as a consequence, information processing is selective. This chapter reviews various properties of memory from the perspective of selective attention. It argues that the ways in which we form, retrieve, and work with our memories largely represent acts of attention. One obvious advantage of framing mnemonic processes as attentional phenomena is that it underscores the processing limits that are central to memory and the necessity of selection. Another advantage is that this framework can aid our understanding of the neural mechanisms that guide memory and their relation to neural mechanisms of perceptual attention.