Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We introduce the concept of high-performance cognition as a domain-general function of acquiring and performing cognitively demanding skills to a high level. We conduct a survey among academic experts to identify key attention categories of high-performance cognition: by independent consensus they highlight the importance of goal-directed attention. Selective, focused, and sustained attention are strongly associated at slightly less complete consensus. They qualify their ratings with free-text reflections. Our work offers a new framing for skilled performance and its underlying cognitive processes.