Divided attention refers to the ability to divide ones attention between two or more tasks. The focused attention models explain how all our inputs are focused on one task at any one time, however it is clear from looking at everyday life that we are able to divide our attention, successfully being able to complete more than one task at the same time. There are two main explanations of divided attention, one is the modular theories and the one I will be focusing on; the capacity model by Kanheman.

Kanheman (1973) put forward the capacity/resource allocation model of attention. This is one of the best known models and suggests that humans have a limited amount of processing capacity and whether two or more tasks can be performed together successfully depends on how much demand they make on this limited capacity processor. This idea of a limited capacity is...