This proposal examines a new approach to the fundamental construct of attending which rests on the assumption that attending is an inherently temporal activity: people respond to dynamic changes in their environment by relying on internal attending rhythms that are capable of entrainments. Two modes of dynamic attending are proposed: Analytic attending, which takes place over relatively small time spans of events, and Future-Oriented attending, which takes place over longer event time periods. The theoretical framework advanced presumes that the structure of environmental events offers a basis of attentional control (viz entrainment) for each attending mode. Of special interest is a specific oscillator model underlying Future-Oriented attending. A number of explicit hypotheses that test predictions of the oscillator model are presented. These pertain to the role of rhythmic factors that are predicted to facilitate or retard attentional entrainments. This research is important because no current psychological model of attention explains how people attend to dynamic aspects of the environment, that is, to events such as speech, visual action patterns, music etc.. Instead, most current theories address attending to static visual objects (e.g., two-dimensional pictures or letter sequences). But much of our everyday world consists of changing, dynamic, events. Because our environment is primarily dynamic and because many attentional dysfunctions (e.g. aphasia) are evident largely when people interact with dynamic events, it is important to develop and test models that recognize these facts.
