In the field of neurocognition, attention is defined as a form of cognitive focus arising from the limited availability of computational resources. The brain, while powerful, is vulnerable to distraction during cognitive processing and tends to block out certain irrelevant information. For example, if you’re engaged in an intense phone call at work, you block out irrelevant stimuli from your coworkers in your context. On the other hand, if you are focusing on a hard cognitive task and someone starts a phone call next to you, your attention may wane, and it may be difficult to maintain focus. In humans, these attention facilities are developed during infancy, and problems during this development process can lead to attention-related pathologies in later life (such as autism or attention deficit disorder; see Posner et al. 2016). Interestingly, the human brain appears to deploy different attention mechanisms: for instance, a mechanism for assigning voluntary attention to parts of a stimulus (like words in a text you read) and a mechanism for attending to neglected parts of a stimulus (such as the words you initially skipped). The first mechanism might be described as goal-driven and the second as stimulus-driven (see Vossel et al. 2014).