Mari Riess Jones – författare

Attention is a central concept in psychology. The term 'attention' itself has persisted, even though it implies a static, insulated capacity that we use when it is necessary to focus upon some relevant or stimulating event. Riess Jones presents a different way of thinking about attention; one that describes it as a continuous activity that is based on energy fluctuating in time. A majority of attention research fails to examine influence of event time structure (i.e., a speech utterance) on listeners' moment-to-moment attending. General research ignores listeners endowed with innate, as well as acquired, temporal biases. Here, attending is portrayed as a dynamic interaction of an individual within his or her surroundings. Importantly, this interaction involves synchronicity between an attender and external events. This emphasis on time and synchronicity distinguishes the author's theory, called Dynamic Attending Theory (DAT), from other approaches to attending which characterize attention metaphorically as a filter, resource pool, spotlight, and so on. Recent research from neuroscience has lent support to Riess Jones' theory, and the goal of this book is to bring this new research as well as her own to the wide audience of psychologists interested in attention more broadly.

The Springer Handbook of Auditory Research presents a series of comprehensive and synthetic reviews of the fundamental topics in modern auditory research. The v- umes are aimed at all individuals with interests in hearing research including advanced graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and clinical investigators. The volumes are intended to introduce new investigators to important aspects of hearing science and to help established investigators to better understand the fundamental theories and data in fields of hearing that they may not normally follow closely. Each volume presents a particular topic comprehensively, and each serves as a synthetic overview and guide to the literature. As such, the chapters present neither exhaustive data reviews nor original research that has not yet appeared in pe- reviewed journals. The volumes focus on topics that have developed a solid data and conceptual foundation rather than on those for which a literature is only beg- ning to develop. New research areas will be covered on a timely basis in the series as they begin to mature.