Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Attention is thought to be a part of a larger cluster of mecha-nisms that serve to orient a cognitive system, to filter contentswith respect to their task relevance, and to devote more com-putation to certain options than to others. All these activitiesproceed under the plausible assumption that not all informationcan be or ought to be processed for a system to satisfice in anever changing world. In this paper, we describe an attention-centric cognitive system called ARCADIA that demonstratesthe orienting, filtering, and resource-skewing functions men-tioned above. The demonstration involves maintaining focuson cognitive tasks in a dynamic environment. While ARCA-DIA carries out a task, limits on its attentional capacity resultin “inattentional blindness” under circumstances analogous tothose where people fail to perceive otherwise salient stimuli.