Distributed attention is a type of attention that involves scanning and wide pattern seeking. Through a simultaneous top-down and bottom-up process of selection and decoding, the eye/brain scans a spatial field and details are sent to the visual cortex to process and order into conceptual wholes. But distributed attention is really a movement between different sites of focused attention. Unlike the consistent focused attention required to follow the linear path of a  sentence, in scanning a spatial environment, the eye/brain breaks visual data into small chunks of information in order to quickly assess meaningful patterns.

Narayanan Srinivasan, Attention (New York: Elsevier, 2009).

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