During the last three decades, there have been enormous advances in our understanding of the neural mechanisms of selective attention at the network as well as the cellular level.

The Oxford Handbook of Attention brings together the different research areas that constitute contemporary attention research into one comprehensive and authoritative volume. In 40 chapters, it covers the most important aspects of attention research from the areas of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, human and animal neuroscience, computational modelling, and philosophy.

The book is divided into 4 main sections. Following an introduction from Michael Posner, the books starts by looking at theoretical models of attention. The next two sections are dedicated to spatial attention and non-spatial attention respectively. Within section 4, the authors consider the interactions between attention and other psychological domains. The last two sections focus on attention-related disorders, and finally, on computational models of attention.

Aimed at both scholars and students, the Oxford Handbook of Attention provides a concise and state-of-the-art review of the current literature in this field.

About the Author:
Anna Christina (Kia) Nobre is Tutorial Fellow in Experimental Psychology at New College, Oxford and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, where she heads the Brain and Cognition Laboratory in the Department of Experimental Psychology. She was educated at the Escola Americana do Rio de Janeiro (EARJ) and Williams College. She received her M.Phil, MSc and PhD (1992) from Yale University for her research on intracranial as well as non-invasive electrophysiological studies of human cognition. During her postdoctoral research at Yale, and Harvard (1992-1994), she was involved in some of the first brain-imaging studies of cognitive functions in the human brain. Prior to her current appointment, she was McDonnell Pew Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience and the Astor and Todd Bird Junior Research Fellow at New College (1994-1996).

Sabine Kastner earned an M.D. degree from the Heinrich-Heine University of Duesseldorf (Germany) and received a PHD degree in neurophysiology from the Georg-August University, Goettingen (Germany) after studying neural correlates of color vision with the late Otto Creutzfeldt at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biophysical Chemistry. During a first postdoc at the same Institute Dr. Kastner became interested in visual attention research while studying neural correlates of parallel and serial visual search. In 1996, she joined Leslie Ungerleider's and Robert Desimone's lab at the NIMH in Bethesda to receive training in human neuroimaging. In a series of influential studies that provided a foundation for the neural basis of human visual attention, she identified mechanisms of selective attention using functional magnetic resonance imaging operating in the human brain similar to those known from monkey physiology. She continued this line of research after joining the faculty at Princeton in 2000.