First attention then intention: Insights from computational neuroscience of vision

Attention is a critical construct for anyone involved in marketing. However, research on attention is currently lacking in the marketing discipline. This is perhaps due to inherent difficulties in measuring attention. The current paper accentuates the importance of better understanding attention, and suggests studying attention as a two-component construct consisting of equally important bottom-up and top-down processes. While research on top-down attention has recently been undertaken by Pieters and Wedel (2004; 2007), the current paper introduces the field of computational neuroscience and its research on visual attention as a useful framework for studying bottom-up attention.