... is usual to only be able to focus our attention (from one modality) on one thing at a time, for instance we can switch our attention from a piece of music to spoken words and back but we can't listen to both at the same time. We can only say one thing at time and think one thing at a time, in this respect high-level cognition is characterised by serial processing. These tasks take a lot of mental effort and therefore draw heavily on the limited capacity of working memory. They are also driven by internal goals (top-down processing); we have to make a conscious decision to focus our attention in a certain direction in order to achieve a particular goal. The distinction between these two modes of cognitive processing, however, is not that clear cut. For instance, tasks are not usually totally automatic nor totally attentional; when automatically ...

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