Q.While searching for a particular shop in a crowded market, a shopper notices the sign of the shop she is looking for immediately, while other shop signs around it are registered only vaguely. Explain this observation in terms of the focus and fringe of attention.

The shopper's attention has both a sharply defined focus and a vaguely aware fringe, and this focus-fringe structure explains why the target shop's sign stands out clearly while the surrounding signs are noticed only dimly. …

This everyday observation illustrates the focus-and-fringe structure of attention described in the chapter. Attention is understood to have both a focus -- the object or event on which the field of awareness is centred -- and a fringe, consisting of objects or events lying away from this centre of awareness, of which a person remains only vaguely, dimly aware, rather than being either fully aware or completely unaware of them.

The shopper, in this scenario, is engaged in what the chapter calls 'search' -- actively looking for a specified target (the particular shop) among a larger set of objects (all the shops in the crowded market). The moment the target shop's sign comes into view, it becomes the sharply defined focal point of the shopper's attention, since her whole search was oriented toward finding precisely that sign, aided further by any relevant preparatory set she may have (e.g., already knowing roughly what the sign looks like). The many other shop signs surrounding the target, meanwhile, are not registered as sharply or in as much detail -- they fall at the fringe of her attention, noticed only vaguely rather than being completely unregistered, which is exactly why she can later recall that 'the market was crowded with many other shops' in only a general, imprecise way, …