For years, psychologists have wondered why people who are highly skilled in one cognitive domain tend to be skilled in other cognitive domains, too. In this article, we explain how attention control provides a common thread among broad cognitive abilities, including fluid intelligence, working memory capacity, and sensory discrimination. Attention control allows us to pursue our goals despite distractions and temptations, to deviate from the habitual, and to keep information in mind amid a maelstrom of divergent thought. Highlighting results from our lab, we describe the role of attention control in information maintenance and disengagement and how these functions contribute to performance in a variety of complex cognitive tasks. We also describe a recent undertaking in which we developed new and improved attention-control tasks, which had higher reliabilities, stronger intercorrelations, and higher loadings on a common factor than traditional measures. From an applied perspective, these new attention-control tasks show great promise for use in personnel selection assessments. We close by outlining exciting avenues for future research.

多年以来，心理学家一直想知道为什么在一个认知领域中技能高超的人也会在其他认知领域中也变得熟练。在本文中，我们解释了注意力控制提供广泛的认知能力之间的共同点，包括流体智力，工作记忆能力和感觉辨别力。注意力控制使我们能够在分散注意力和诱惑的情况下追求自己的目标，偏离习惯，并在纷繁复杂的思想中记住信息。通过重点介绍我们实验室的结果，我们描述了注意力控制在信息维护和脱离接触中的作用，以及这些功能如何促进各种复杂的认知任务的表现。我们还描述了最近的一项工作，在该工作中，我们开发了新的和改进的注意力控制任务，与传统方法相比，该任务具有更高的可靠性，更强的相互关系以及较高的共同因素。从应用的角度来看，这些新的注意力控制任务显示出对人员选拔评估的巨大希望。最后，我们概述了未来研究的令人兴奋的途径。