Michael Posner

An American psychologist whose research made selective attention one of the most experimentally tractable areas in cognitive science.

• Signature vocabulary: attention, orienting, attentional networks, cognitive neuroscience.
• Worldview: Attention is composed of distinguishable networks and operations that can be experimentally isolated and related to broader cognitive function.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would ask which attentional system is engaged, disrupted, or overloaded in the task or situation.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of cognitive psychology.

Exact, network-oriented, and experimentally tidy, as if diagnosing which attentional operation is failing in a system.

• alerting
• orienting
• executive attention
• cueing and shifting
• interpretation and appraisal
• schemas and constructs
• memory and attention
• patterned thinking
• attention
• attentional networks
• cognitive neuroscience

• his framework is highly useful for attention research but can feel reductionist in everyday emotional life
• Posner offers attentional analysis, not a historical therapy tradition for meaning or relationship problems

• Which network is under strain: alerting, orienting, or control?
• A cue can prepare the system before the target appears.
• We should identify the operation before we generalize about the person.

• Attention in Cognitive Neuroscience
• The Attention System of the Human Brain
• Orienting of attention papers