An inside joke in the 1950s and 60s among psychologists tells the story of two psychologists who had never seen each other before, meeting in a conference, and by way of getting acquainted one of them asks the other: ‘And, dear colleague, what are you in: Reaction time or percentage correct?’ At that time it were the hey-days of reaction time (RT) research, and many popular research paradigms concerned basic issues of information processing and RT. Nowadays, when you dare say that your research is mainly concerned with fundamental issues of RTs, you are barely considered as a psychologist.

Typically RT research and also attentional research is far neglected in most recent introductory books in cognitive psychology. Also in introductory psychology books in general, there is no chapter or section on RTs, and attention is treated in a few pages somewhere in the chapter on perception. This is peculiar in view of the fact that nearly 40% of all research in most psychology journals measures RTs, and that attention is considered as a central component not only in issues of perception, but also of memory and action.

In view of these considerations the book of Sanders is filling in an important gap in the Psychology literature. Besides the fact that the author describes the state of the art in two imported basic fields of psychology, fundamental RT issues and attention, also an important effort is made to link these fundamental issues to everyday applications. In contrast to the claim that basic research is irrelevant to research in the ‘real world’, throughout the book Sanders demonstrates that both types of research, which can be called process oriented and task oriented, need each other because they are both meaningless without the other.

The book consists of two major parts. Chapters I–V are devoted to basic RT research and related issues. Chapters VI to IX are concerned with basic issues of attention research. The last chapter deals with real-life skills and the integration of basic research into complex real-world tasks.

In Chapter I, Sanders makes a general introduction to reaction processes. Importantly, in this chapter he answers some of the major criticisms to basic RT research. Also the conditions under which RTs can reveal valuable information about underlying processes are described. As a case in point, the author remarks that RTs over 2 s are seldom of any interest, because too many different processing routes may be involved. RT only has its value when the subject is certain about what is going on.

In Chapter II follows a general description of properties and models of RT. In contrast to other recent overviews of RT models, Sanders tries to explain the most important assumptions and goals of the models without bothering the reader with too much mathematical modeling. Most of the mathematical models treat RTs as a single process, without being concerned too much with the psychological underpinnings. The pros and cons of some of the models are discussed and especially the power of Ratcliff’s (1978) stochastic diffusion model is stressed. Further, some important models and techniques are treated, including speed-accuracy trade-off, fast-guess models, the deadline model and Meyer’s (Meyer et al., 1988) decomposition technique. The last part of the chapter is devoted to sequential effects, which is a little bit too much oriented to Pashler and Baylis’ (1991) work.

In Chapter III Sanders is completely at home on the topics related to stage analysis. Everybody who is a little bit acquainted with fundamental RT research knows how important the work of Sanders has been for the AFM method. The chapter begins with the classical work of Donders, followed by the likewise classical work of Sternberg (1969). The stage analysis paradigm is extended to many other related topics. Especially interesting is the relevance of the AFM theory and experiments on the controversy between discrete and continuous information processing. Sanders also includes evidence of evoked potential studies, and extensively discusses Miller’s compromise of an Asynchrone Discrete coding model (Miller, 1988). In my opinion, nobody is better suited to discuss the AFM logic and oversee the implications of the method.

Building upon the AFM model, the variables affecting the different processing stages are discussed in Chapter IV. Different topics, typically belonging to other chapters of traditional psychology books are brought into relation to the basic RT issues. Among these are the issues of feature seperability and global precedence for perception, letter identification and the word superiority effect for basic language issues, stimulus-response compatibility and the Simon effect for issues on response selection, and the stop-signal paradigm, complexity effects and Fitts law for issues related to motor control and motor learning. The issues in this chapter are limited to simple and discrete tasks, with the discussion of the more complex tasks in Chapter X.

In Chapter V the topics are somewhat extended to paradigms which are traditionally less related to choice RT experiments. Sanders combines results and issues from the AFM methodology, showing that the use of RT goes far beyond these research areas. Several of these topics bear directly on stage analysis including among others, target classification tasks, of which Sternberg’s original memory scanning experiment is the most typical example, same-different tasks, and functional visual field studies. Sanders shows how the use of eye-movement measurements can further extend our knowledge about the nature, duration and seriality of different processing stages. The chapter ends with a large applied section where the importance of basic research about the functional visual field on reading research is demonstrated.

Chapter VI is the start of the second part of the book related to attention. This chapter is meant to set the stage for what is treated more elaborately in the next chapters. Do we have to consider attention only as a field of research, or can attention also be used as a theoretical construct, describing a unitary concept of human information processing? I think that most psychologists who work in related fields will agree with the author that the old idea of one unitary bottleneck system has to be abandoned. The field of attention describes the most important limitations of the functions of the human mind like perception, memory and action. The treatment of attention in the following chapters however, still follows the pattern of the division of attention in subfields on the basis of its historical roots, namely focused attention in Chapter VII, with the major discussion about the loci of attentional bottlenecks, divided attention in Chapter VIII, with the main point of discussion being the difference between automatic and controlled processing, and sustained attention in Chapter IX, with the recently somewhat neglected area of vigilance research.