This chapter covers the history of attention research and introduces the main issues that are being actively studied today. Key figures in the development of attention as a topic of scientific research are highlighted, including William James, Hermann von Helmholtz, Franciscus Donders, Colin Cherry, Donald Broadbent, Anne Treisman, and Michael Posner. The events leading up to the “cognitive revolution” are described and the initial studies of attention motivated by the “cocktail party phenomenon” are introduced. Classic paradigms to test the functions of attention are described, including the “shadowing task”, the Posner cuing paradigm, visual search tasks, the Eriksen flanker task, and the attention network task (ANT). The distinction between overt attention and covert attention is explained, and the link between attention and eye-movements is discussed. Important theories of attention are introduced, including the early versus late selection controversy, the spotlight and zoom-lens models of attention, the motor theory of attention, and feature integration theory. The relation of attention to consciousness is introduced and the concepts of distraction and mind-wandering are introduced.

This chapter describes the many methods of Cognitive Neuroscience that are revealing the neural processes underlying complex cognitive processes in the brain. The benefits and limitations of each method are discussed, highlighting how there is no single “best” method and how the choice of method in any experiment should be motivated by the hypothesis being evaluated. Neuropsychology provides novel insights into the neural bases of cognitive processes but is limited because it relies on naturally occurring lesions. Neuroimaging methods (fMRI, PET, fNIRS) provide excellent spatial resolution but cannot assess the temporal order of neural activity across regions. Electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) can track neural activity in real time, but their spatial precision is limited because they are recorded from outside the head. Neurostimulation methods (TMS, tDCS, tACS) can uniquely assess causality by testing if, and when, a brain area is necessary for a particular function. Methods using non-human animals (e.g., single-unit recordings) can provide the highest levels of spatial and temporal precision, but they are limited to mental processes that the non-human animals can be trained to do. This chapter ends with a comparison of methods that includes portability, spatial precision, and temporal resolution.

In this chapter, we look at sociolinguistic aspects of globalization. The sociolinguistic turn entailed a focus on variation, which became more intricate as social barriers shifted. Recent changes have intensified such trends, and today language variation is no longer seen as static, in a socially stratified and rather rigid system. Rather, it represents a negotiated system and a fluid form of identity construction characterized by ever-widening social networks in an increasingly digital world. We look at superdiversity in the postmodern world and effects of mobility on sociolinguistic repertoires, present theoretical and methodological issues, both geopolitically and geoculturally, and introduce the World Language System, which orders the world’s languages into different layers according to criteria such as usage, function and speaker numbers. Finally, we look at winners and losers of language and globalization (countries, companies and individuals) so as to assess general sociolinguistic trends in a postmodern world.