What makes one person better at controlling attention than the next person? Attempts to answer this question have largely focused on measuring individuals’ cognitive abilities. However, variation in attentional performance can also be due to differences in strategy. Here, we describe research showing that individuals vary dramatically in how they choose to control attention, with many reliably choosing suboptimal strategies. Optimal strategy choice appears to be unrelated to attentional control ability, general cognitive ability, or even strategy choice on other attention tasks. It does, however, correlate with how effortful individuals find the optimal strategy, which suggests that strategy choice may be driven by subjective, task-specific effort demands. These findings represent initial steps toward fully characterizing an individual profile of attentional control strategies.

中文翻译：

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建立注意力控制策略的个人档案

是什么让一个人比另一个人更能控制注意力？回答这个问题的尝试主要集中在衡量个人的认知能力上。但是，注意力表现的差异也可能是由于策略上的差异。在这里，我们描述的研究表明，个人在选择控制注意力的方式上有很大差异，并且有许多可靠地选择了次优策略。最佳策略选择似乎与注意力控制能力，一般认知能力甚至其他注意力任务的策略选择无关。但是，它确实与努力的个体如何找到最佳策略有关，这表明策略的选择可能受主观的，针对特定任务的努力需求的驱动。