The role of attention in the exercise of a skill is to pick out those features of the scene that are pragmatically significant and that therefore, taken together, define “the situation.” In the early stages of learning a skill, explicit propositional knowledge, stated in language for instructional purposes, plays a crucial role in directing attention toward its proper objects. Bathed with attention in this way, these objects then become available for integration with affect and action routines by the subconscious mind, following a close call.
