“Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German,”(James, 1890, p. 403–404). How does such a psychological concept relate to human brain activity? An influential model in clinical neuropsychology (Sohlberg and Mateer, 2001) differentiates five dissociable components that are focused, sustained, alternating, selective, and divided attention. Sustained attention concerns focusing attention on stimulation for an extended period. Selective attention concerns concentrating on one source of information in exclusion of another, in the service of some task. Divided attention concerns attending to one task when there are other attentional demands, such as another parallel task. From a cognitive hearing science perspective, attention has been a somewhat nebulous concept that depends partially on working memory (Barrouillet and Camos, 2020; Rönnberg et al., 2022a, b) and upon related executive control mechanisms (Badre, 2021).