Domain of attention	Definition	Functional example
Alertness/arousal	Ability and readiness to respond	Response to warning signals
Selective attention	Ability to focus on specific stimuli while ignoring irrelevant stimuli	Reading while people talk in the background
Sustained attention (vigilance)	Ability to maintain attention over a prolonged period of time	Driving a car for long distances
Spatial attention	Ability to detect and deploy attention to all sides of space	Attending to people sitting on left and right side of the table
Divided attention	Ability to multitask and to divide attention between 2 or more tasks	Talking on the telephone while cooking